Dulle Griet

The Dulle Griet — roughly "Mad Meg" in English — is one of the largest surviving medieval siege cannons in the world, stationed on Ghent's Vrijdagmarkt square since the fifteenth century. Cast around 1450, the gun weighs approximately 16,000 kilograms and was built to fire stone cannonballs some 64 centimetres in diameter. Its name borrows from Flemish folklore: the fearsome, armour-clad Meg of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of the same name, a woman who storms the gates of Hell. Whether the cannon was ever fired in actual combat remains historically uncertain — it is thought to have served mainly as a symbol of civic power and Ghent's military ambition. Today it sits freely accessible in the open air as a protected heritage monument, a rare tangible relic of late-medieval artillery culture.