Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder

After the Alteration of 1578 Amsterdam went Protestant and public Catholic worship was prohibited - but the Republic's practice was toleration in private, so Catholics built churches inside houses, unmarked from the street and known to the authorities, who took bribes and looked away. Around a hundred such schuilkerken existed in the city. Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder - Our Lord in the Attic - is the one that survives complete: a merchant named Jan Hartman bought a canal house and two behind it in 1661 and knocked the upper floors together into a church, with a nave, galleries on two levels, an organ and an altar, seating about a hundred and fifty, reached by the ordinary stairs of a house. The rooms below are furnished as a seventeenth-century home. It functioned until 1887 and became a museum in 1888, one of the oldest in the city.

What you actually see

• A church in three attics - nave, galleries, organ and altar above a canal house.
• A hidden church that survived - the one complete example of about a hundred.
• Seventeenth-century rooms below - the house furnished as it was lived in.
• Toleration in practice - worship banned in public, permitted out of sight.

When to go

All year. Two hours.

Honest expectations

The stairs are narrow and steep, as in any canal house, and there is no lift to the church. Timed tickets and it fills in summer. The entrance is through a modern building next door.

Nearby

De Wallen and the Oude Kerk are a minute away; Dam Square is west.