Drents Museum

Step in from the square, and the noise of Assen drops away. Outside there are bicycles, café chairs, and the soft rattle of wheels on brick. Inside, the air turns cool and still. Somewhere ahead, behind glass, is a girl who lived about two thousand years ago. Nearby lies a boat older than the pyramids. This is the Drents Museum, and it holds some of the oldest human stories in northern Europe.

First, a word about where you are. Assen is the capital of Drenthe, a quiet province in the north-east of the Netherlands. It is a land of heath, sandy soil, peat bogs and old oak woods. For centuries, few outsiders paid it much attention. That quiet worked in its favour. The peat kept things. The sand kept things. And slowly, farmers, peat cutters and road builders began to find them.

The museum began in the middle of the nineteenth century, in 1854, as a provincial collection of antiquities. Local scholars wanted a home for the finds coming out of the Drenthe soil — stone axes, pottery, bronze, and later much stranger things. Over time, the collection outgrew its first rooms. Today the museum spreads across several historic buildings around the central square, and a modern wing joins them together.

Take a moment to look at those buildings. The grand brick main building once served as the seat of the provincial government. It has tall windows, decorative stonework and the confident style of the late nineteenth century. Next to it stand older, lower houses with simpler lines. Assen itself grew up around a medieval convent, and this square is still the old heart of the town. History here is not only behind glass. It is in the street plan under your feet.

Now, here is the first surprise. The newest part of the museum is mostly hidden. In 2011, a large exhibition hall opened underground, beneath a grassy mound in the garden. From outside, you might walk past and see only a green slope. Below it, there is space for big international exhibitions. The designers chose to go down rather than up, so the historic square keeps its old shape and scale.

Let us go to the most famous visitor in the museum — the Yde Girl. In 1897, peat cutters near the village of Yde found a body in the bog. At first, they were frightened, and some of the remains were damaged or lost. But much survived. The acid, oxygen-poor water of the peat had preserved her skin and hair. Scientists later studied her carefully.

What they found is moving. She was a teenager, around sixteen years old, when she died. A woollen band was still around her neck, and the evidence suggests she was strangled. Part of her long red-brown hair had been shaved off. Why she died, nobody knows for certain. Some researchers think of punishment, others of sacrifice. The truth stayed in the bog. A reconstruction of her face, based on her skull, lets you look at her as someone who once lived.

Stand quietly in front of her for a minute. Many visitors expect something gruesome. Instead, most people leave feeling tenderness. She is small. Her hair still has colour. She was found close to here, in the same kind of landscape you crossed to reach Assen. This is not a mummy from a distant desert. She is a girl from Drenthe, and she has come back to her home province.

Now the second surprise, and it is a big one. Look for a simple, dark, hollowed log. This is the Pesse canoe. Road workers found it in 1955 while building a motorway near the village of Pesse. Scientists dated it to roughly ten thousand years ago. It is often described as the oldest known boat in the world. Someone cut it from a single pine trunk, using stone tools and probably fire.

Think about what that means. When this canoe floated on a lake or stream, the ice age had only recently ended. The North Sea was partly dry land. People here hunted, fished and gathered plants. And one of them sat in this log and pushed off from the shore. It is not beautiful in the usual sense. It is rough and modest. But it carries a very long human story — the first time someone decided to travel on water.

Outside the museum, Drenthe has another famous feature: the hunebedden. These are giant stone tombs, built around five thousand years ago by early farming communities. Huge boulders, carried here by glaciers, were set upright and covered with capstones. The museum shows what archaeologists found inside — pottery, tools and traces of burial. If you drive through the province later, you will see these tombs standing in fields and woods. After visiting here, they feel much less mysterious.

The museum is not only about the deep past. It also collects art, with a strong focus on realism and on the decades around 1900, when decorative design flourished across Europe. Furniture, glass, silver and paintings from that period fill some of the older rooms. And the underground hall regularly hosts large exhibitions about ancient cultures from around the world. These shows have made a small provincial museum a destination for visitors from across the Netherlands and beyond.

Those exhibitions also brought a hard moment. In January 2025, during an exhibition about ancient Dacia, which was a kingdom in what is now Romania, thieves broke into the museum at night. They took a gold helmet and gold bracelets that were on loan from Romania. The theft became international news and caused deep pain in both countries. It reminded everyone how fragile these shared treasures are, and how much trust a loan between museums requires.

As you leave, step back out onto the square and look again at the brick façades and the green mound in the garden. Below it is the modern hall. Behind those windows lie a ten-thousand-year-old canoe and a girl from the bog. And all around you is the same Drenthe soil that kept them safe for so long. Walk slowly. The quiet fields outside town are part of this museum too.