Coordinates: 52 9 N 4 30 E
Population: 118,702 (2004 est.)
A symbol as much as it is a supper, the feast of Thanksgiving held in the U.S. the fourth Thursday in November first combined North American foodstuffs with European recipes and cooking methods. Actual evidence of any kind of festival in the fall of 1621 is scant, yet we know that if a meal of mythic proportions did take place at Plimoth Plantation, it would have been prepared by a group of Separatists who had fled religious persecution in England.
Before reaching present-day Massachusetts however, these British transplants spent roughly ten years in Leiden, Holland–a settlement whose origins can be traced to the Roman Empire. Leiden is also the site of the oldest university in the Netherlands, a school that had already been established by the time the Pilgrims turned up in 1609. Visitors to the City of Refugees today will find two small museums dedicated to the Pilgrims and the brief period they spent among these narrow Dutch canals and alleyways.
Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.
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