The Umdracht of Huissen

Huissen is mentioned as early as 814 as Hosenhym, but its wayward history begins in 1242, when Count Dietrich of Cleves took possession of the place. The counts of Cleves set up a toll on the Rhine and built a castle, and because the surrounding land fell to the counts of Guelders, Huissen and the hamlet of Malburgen became a Cleves enclave inside the duchy of Guelders. So it remained until 1816. Whoever walked from Arnhem to Huissen crossed a national border for centuries.

Such a strange scrap of foreign soil regularly came under fire. In 1502 Duke Charles of Guelders laid siege to the town; after a good month he was driven off by troops from Cleves. The siege and relief of Huissen are re-enacted by the guilds every year to this day.

The real meaning of the enclave showed itself after the Reformation. In 1582 Catholic worship was banned in Gelderland, but Cleves preserved the free exercise of the old faith in Huissen. The great town church always remained Catholic, and from far around believers walked along church paths to Huissen for Mass. The Blessed Sacrament procession too could simply carry on. Tradition names 1560 as the year it was first held; historians have found no proof of that, but consider it likely that the procession dates from the second half of the sixteenth century. It appears in the records with certainty in 1641.

From the seventeenth century onwards the Umdracht grew into a great demonstration of Catholic devotion. For believers from Gelderland, Corpus Christi was the one day of the year on which they could openly defy the Protestant authorities, and they went to Huissen in droves. When the Apostolic Vicar Johannes van Neercassel took refuge in the town between 1675 and 1679, the procession gained extra lustre; in 1678 even Cardinal Luigi Bevilaqua walked along, papal envoy to the peace negotiations in Nijmegen. Travellers from Utrecht who saw the procession in 1720 noted a multitude of people who had turned out to watch the spectacle.

The Umdracht also became a popular festival. Besides the religious decorations the town was full of stalls and tables, and the Geldersche Volksalmanak simply counted the procession among the annual fairs. Until 1920 boats even carried pilgrims from Arnhem and Nijmegen to Huissen on Corpus Christi day.

The hardest test came under French rule. In 1812 processions were banned, but burgomaster Johann Friedrich Pilgrim ignored the ban and let the Umdracht go ahead in 1812 and 1813. That civil disobedience proved worth its weight in gold. After Huissen was handed over to the Netherlands in 1816, the town could show, under the regulations of 1822 and 1848, that it was the only place in Gelderland north of the rivers where the procession had taken place every year without interruption. The Umdracht therefore fell outside the procession ban that remained in force elsewhere in the Netherlands until 1983. Since 1912 it has been held not on the Thursday but on the Sunday two weeks after Whitsun.

In the Second World War Huissen became a front-line town and one of the hardest-hit places in the Netherlands. After an incendiary raid in May 1943, a bombardment of the old centre followed on 2 October 1944, during the fighting after the Battle of Arnhem, costing about a hundred lives. In all, more than a hundred and seventy people of Huissen died through the violence of the war. Both Catholic churches and the Protestant church were destroyed, and in the autumn of 1944 the whole population had to be evacuated from the Over-Betuwe. When Canadian soldiers liberated Huissen on 2 April 1945, there was not one Huissenaar there to see it.

On 11 June 1945, Corpus Christi day, the town lay in ruins and many inhabitants had not yet returned. But the people of Huissen knew what was at stake: the right of procession held only as long as the Umdracht took place every year. So the procession was postponed, not cancelled. On Sunday 26 August 1945 the Umdracht passed through the streets, past the rubble of the ruined town church.

The town was rebuilt, and in 1962 the town church got back its tower, forty-five metres high. The Umdracht also survived the church reforms of the sixties and seventies, though it took on more the character of a themed pageant. The centuries-old guilds still walk along, and in the local dialect the day is simply called the Umdracht. For some four centuries now the procession has passed through Huissen, and whoever watches it go by is looking at the longest memory the little town has.