A singular history, and magnificence in the plural... Memories are everywhere here, of people and of things: the colour of wheat, the weight of firearms and the smell of ink. Listen to the silence of the stones. It resonates with the litanies of monks, the life of the farm and the dull roar of battle.
Ardenne was a Norbertine abbey, founded in 1121. An abbey in the fields, a granary on the cereal-growing plain.
Ardenne was also the scene of fierce combat in the summer og 1944, and a monument commemorates the executions that occured here.
But Ardenne had a stroke of luck: the promise of rebirth when the IMEC archives moved into the old abbey. Think about it! Twenty kilometers of bookshelves. Some 80,000 books ans periodicals.. The papers of great thinkers, philosophers and writers.
Ardenne is a sanctuary for learning, where the memory of contemporary publishing is preserved. Scholars now gather behind the Gothic walls of the abbey nave in the fabulous library. Ardenne has regained its intellectual and cultural dimension. Come see how beautiful it is, how noble its past and how rich its future.