Museum De Waag

On the wall of the weigh house on the Brink, Deventer's market square, hangs a big copper kettle. Local legend says a counterfeiter was boiled alive in it for putting cheap metal into the town's coins, and the holes in its side are said to come from French soldiers in Napoleon's time. The old kettle has since been moved indoors, and a replica now hangs in its place.

The building went up in 1528, when merchants brought spices, cloth and printed books here to be weighed, and today it is the city museum. It shows the collections of Deventer and of the De Waag society, from medieval finds and old coins to the town's silver of the 16th to 18th centuries. Among the paintings are the four Evangelists painted in 1621 by Hendrick ter Brugghen, the Utrecht follower of Caravaggio, and works by Gerard ter Borch, who spent most of his career in Deventer.

The kettle's counterfeiter has a modern counterpart inside. Han van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers fooled Dutch experts in the 1930s and 1940s, was born in Deventer in 1889, and the museum holds his Last Supper, painted in 1941.