Bovenkerk

The Bovenkerk is a massive, Gothic church and the maximum putting element on the skyline of Kampen, Overijssel, Netherlands. The indoors of the church contains an early-Renaissance choir display screen, a stone pulpit and a huge organ. The church has 1,250 seats. It is a Reformed church. A common exercise for old historic churches became to bury the dead below the Church. The Bovenkerk is no exception to this exercise, where famous Dutch persons originating from Kampen are buried. One of them is Hendrick Avercamp, one of the first panorama painters of the seventeenth-century Dutch faculty, specialised in painting the Netherlands in winter.

Another is Jan Bantjes and Jacomina Leussen who had been wealthy landowners, shipowners, financiers of Berbice plantations and privateers. Their eldest son Gerrit Bantjes who left for the Cape of Good Hope in Nov.1754 started out a line of descendants who laid down outstanding South African records which includes the exploratory Kommissitrek of 1834 to Port Natal to find a new homeland for the Cape Boers, the Natal-land Report which commenced The Great Trek and the battles that followed, the Discovery of the Witwatersrand Gold Reef in 1884 and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886.