Ieper

Known as the Ypres of World War I infamy, "Wipers" to the Tommies in the trenches, and Ieper (pronounced eeper) to the locals, this town was the Hiroshima of the Great War. Founded in the 10th century as a popular stop on the Brugge-Paris trade route, Ieper's textile industry helped it expand into one of the region's major mercantile centers during the Middle Ages. Epidemics, sieges, repressions, and strife took their toll, and the cloth makers packed their bags in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ieper then became a quiet convent town, the seat of a bishopric, but was drawn into the crossfire of World War I three centuries later.

There were four major battles at Ieper; in the second (1915), the German army introduced a new weapon, poison gas, while the third (1917) was a particularly infamous disaster of roiling mud and horrifying casualties in which the Allies gained only a few kilometers. In the last battle in 1918, the Allies decisively broke through the German lines, finally securing the western front. Completely destroyed in the war, modern Ieper is a painstaking reconstruction of major medieval buildings—the last were laid in the 1960s. The city proudly stands as homage to the spirit of the Flemings, and to the memory of the soldiers who fell in the surrounding fields and who lie in the vast cemeteries spreading over the flat polder plains.