A small (pop. 35,000) charming Flemish city near the French border about an hour and a half from Brussels, Ypres is known to English-speakers by its French name – in Flemish it’s Ieper. Its atmospheric mediaeval old quarter is typified by the 13th-century Gothic Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall), but its main claim to fame these days is as the site of three key WWI battles, one in 1914, another in 1915, and especially the Third Battle of Ypres (aka the Battle of Passchendaele), 31 July to 6 November 1917, with British Empire forces along with French and Belgians trying to take the area back from the Germans who had invaded it early on in the war. And now a new installation has been added to the battlefield: “Coming World, Remember Me” consists of 600,000 clay sculptures – one for each soldier and civilian – killed on Belgian soil during the war, and at their centre, a giant egg, to symbolise a new world. In addition to a number of battlefields and cemeteries, other major sites include the 1927 Menin Gate Memorial and a pair of excellent museums, In Flanders Fields in the Lakenhalle and the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 (in the very nearby town of Zonnebeke).

Read more Tripatini contributor Paul Varmuza´s post Europe´s Top 4 World War I Destinations.

Porcupine