Leiden – a city where houses speak in verses and formulas (33 photos)

In the Dutch city of Leiden, the walls of buildings hold not only the memories of bygone centuries but also thoughts captured in poetry.





Over a hundred works of poetry, meticulously painted with a brush, can be found on the facades of buildings throughout the city. Lines by Rimbaud and Shakespeare, Yeats and Marina Tsvetaeva, Dylan Thomas and Derek Walcott, as well as local poets, live here. Most of them are in Dutch and English, but a few walls address the world in Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Surinamese, and other languages.



The "Wall Poems" project began in 1992 at the initiative of the private Tegen-Beeld Foundation, founded by Ben Valenkamp and Jan-Willem Bruyns, with the support of companies and the municipality. The first poem to appear on the wall was by our poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The project officially ended in 2005 with the Spanish poem "De profundis" by Federico García Lorca, but new lines continued to appear until 2010.





Leiden has historically been associated with poetry. The city has been home to numerous writers, including Piet Paltjens, J.C. Bloem, Maarten Biesheuvel, Jan Wolkers, and Maarten 't Hart, who lived or studied here. The renowned Leiden University has traditionally attracted scholars from around the world. Key discoveries in physics were made within its walls, including Snell's law of refraction and Pieter van Musschenbroek's invention of the Leyden jar.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first obtained liquid helium here and approached absolute zero. Albert Einstein also spent part of his career at Leiden University. The city boasts 13 Nobel laureates.



Inspired by this scientific legacy and the poetry wall project, two physicists, Sense Jan van der Molen and Ivo van Founten, decided to infuse the urban landscape with the language of another great poetry—the poetry of the exact sciences. In 2015, they began painting mathematical and physical formulas on the walls of buildings.



Thus, Leiden became a unique open book, in which one can read both hidden lyricism and universal laws of the universe on the adjacent street-pages.