AT A GLANCE
Why go?
STAM – Ghent City Museum is the place where the story of Ghent is told in full, from a small settlement between two rivers to a medieval metropolis and today's lively city of students, commerce and culture. Housed on the historic Bijloke site at Godshuizenlaan 2, it pairs a striking glass-fronted contemporary entrance with the vaulted rooms of a 14th-century Cistercian abbey, so the building itself becomes part of the exhibit.↗↗
Its permanent exhibition, 'The Story of Ghent', runs as a chronological circuit through six museum rooms, weaving together more than three hundred evocative collection pieces and multimedia displays. The undisputed crowd-pleaser is a gigantic aerial photograph of the city laid out as a floor you can actually walk across. If you want to understand Ghent before you explore its cobbled centre, this is the ideal starting point.↗↗↗
A museum made of layers
STAM opened its doors in October 2010 on a site with centuries of history behind it. The story begins in 1228, when the Mariahospitaal moved to the Bijloke meadows and grew into a Cistercian abbey of nuns who cared for the sick and the poor for some 800 years. After the abbey was dissolved and later served as an old men's home, the city bought the buildings in 1913 to house its antiquities museum, which opened in 1928.
