Nocturnes - Belgian museum of freemasonry

Short days, and cold evenings are definitely not a big source of inspiration for me. I haven't been writing for a while, even though I still have few topics waiting in the queue since the better days - guilty as charged. Let's try to break that stagnation a bit.

If as me, you're not a big fan of outdoor activities when temperature leans towards 0, but you still want to do _something_, and unlike me you have free Thursday evenings - why not go to the museum?

Now, museums in Brussels have pretty mean opening hours. You'd have to skip work or get up early on Saturday (but Saturday is already occupied with shopping, which you can't do on any other day either!). Fortunately, there are ways.

Brussels Nocturnes are organized every year by Brussels Museum Council. Every Thursday couple of Brussels museums are open until late evening, often providing special guides or other events. This year edition is almost finished already, so if you haven't notice that in my calendar, you missed it! Check out details at their website:

http://www.brusselsmuseumsnocturnes.be/

We managed to visit one (yes, only one) museum. I really wanted to see more, but as much as some of the evenings are very kids-friendly, none of them are really baby-friendly, which is usually a show-stopper for us (but not for long!). The one visited was the Belgian museum of freemasonry.

http://mbfm.be

I was interested in freemasonry for some time now, especially when I started investigating Brussels for this little blog here and I saw what impact the fraternity had on the city.When I saw that the museum has open days it was already decided.

Museum is placed on rather quiet street and doesn't really catch your attention if you're not looking for it, with fits the discretion that Freemasons are known by. At the same time though, it welcomes the visitors with big transparency statement on the wall.

There are several groups of freemasonry all over the world, not all of them recognize each other as "true" ones. The museum is run by all the Belgian lodges (at least all the big ones), which I find to be a nice touch, since they generally don't go together well.

Entrance is pretty neat. You have to wait to the door to be open in a small room, surrounded by freemasonry symbols. Behind the door you enter the corridor with sky-like ceiling, traditional to freemasonry. Very impressive!

The excitement wears off pretty quick though. Museum, even though small, contains quite some amount of items, but is definitely missing more organization and explanation. I found it was lacking some general introduction where the freemasonry came from, what it means, what is it today. It felt a bit like all the items were just thrown inside to be watched, but there was no, or little story behind them. That's unless you have a guide.

During the Nocturnes there were several guides in place, as far as I understand Freemasons themselves. They were all very nice and helpful (and one was pretty drunk, too! :)) We rather quickly acquainted one of them and spend most of the time not only asking questions in context of the museum, but also having general discussions of life, universe and the rest. He was the one to point few items in the museum and say some story about them.

Unfortunately, for the sake of the exhibits taking photos is forbidden, only general "ambience" pictures are allowed, with no flash. Fortunately, my camera deals pretty well with darkness so I could photograph a wall with names of famous masons. According to the story of our guide, the stain on the wall, which they tried to get rid of by any means, turned out to be horse piss! The room used to be stables in the past.

I was expecting the museum to be rather empty, but it turned out to be really busy! The legend of Freemasonry attracted many people, so it got crowded and loud, for such a small place. Not the way I want to contemplate such a topic. I am therefore hoping to come back there, in some better circumstances and get to know more about it.

Generally, if you're interested by the topic, it's a great museum as long as you get a guide. Without a guide, you'll probably be bored after 15 minutes, but with a proper one - you could spend hours there going through all the exhibits.

Remember the Brussels Nocturnes for the next year. It's a nice way to pass the time, maybe see friends, and afterwards go to a nice resto nearby to warm up (we chose the La fin de siècle, which Chris described in his last post). And there's so many museums to choose from, everyone will find something interesting.