Welcome, fellow adventurers, to the Deventer City Tour! Perched on a bend of the IJssel river, Deventer has been trading, weighing, printing and baking its way through Dutch history for over a thousand years. As a proud member of the medieval Hanseatic League, its merchants shipped grain, cloth and — above all — spiced honey cake down the river to ports as far away as Norway. Today the cobbled Brink still hosts the largest secondhand book market in the world every summer, a fitting tradition for a city that has always had ink in its veins. Long before it became a trading powerhouse, Deventer was already a place people came to learn. The Anglo-Saxon missionary Lebuinus preached here in 768, a school grew up around his church, and by the late 1300s a local deacon named Geert Grote had turned the city into the birthplace of the Modern Devotion, a spiritual movement that would ripple across Europe and shape thinkers like Erasmus. Along the way you'll meet a weigh house older than the Dutch Republic, a toy collection tucked into two merchant houses, a courageous young diarist, and the last fragments of the wall that once kept it all safe. Answer each stop's question correctly to earn a letter — collect all nine, and see if you can spell out exactly what this city has always been built on.

A Hanseatic City of Books, Bells and Spice Cake

Deventer City Tour

9 stops · 165 min · 3.3 km

€ 14,99€ 9,99

Instant access after payment — you'll get a code by email and on screen to unlock the tour.