Some 50 cobblestones are going missing every month from the historic streets of Belgium’s Bruges. — BERND THISSEN/dpa
Drugs, sex, murder, attempted murder, black humour – all are to be found amid the mayhem that is the 2008 film In Bruges, starring Irish actors Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell.
In the film, the actors play a pair of Irish gangsters trying to hide out in the Belgian city famous for its medieval-era heritage and old town.
But one thing the flick does not have is people stealing the city’s famous cobblestones, which were made from porphyry quarried from Wallonia, a rock prized for its durability.
According to city alderman Franky Demon, light-fingered visitors are helping themselves to at least 50 of the cobblestones every month, apparently to take home as souvenirs.
“At iconic sites such as the Minnewater, the Vismarkt, the Markt and the Gruuthuse-museum, an estimated 50 to 70 cobblestones disappear every month and the true figure may be even higher still,” Demon told Belga, the national press agency.
The number of stolen stones probably increases during the summer as visitor numbers soar, according to the official.
Not only does yanking the stones out of the ground undermine the city centre’s renowned aesthetic, it leaves pedestrians vulnerable to taking a tumble, particularly elderly walkers who can be frail or less nimble than others.
“Anyone that walks through Bruges is walking through centuries of history,” Demon said, exhorting would-be thieves to “leave the cobblestones where they belong”.
But perhaps it is not such a surprise that Bruges would be the setting for such acquisitiveness: after all, it was the home town of Doctor Evil from the Austin Powers film series, a character who described himself as the son of a “relentlessly self-improving bou- langerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy...”. – dpa
