5 weird Amsterdam museums devoted to cats, marijuana, pipes, torture and houseboats
- As well as Amsterdam’s many major museums, the city has a number of more eclectic or specialised collections
- These include the bloodthirsty torture museum, a collection dedicated to cats, and another celebrating the city’s numerous houseboats
Amsterdam has more than 80 museums, including the world-renowned Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum.
Hidden among the cultural bounty in the Dutch capital are five smaller, more unusual collections that celebrate not art, history or science, but are instead devoted to violence, drugs, cats, pipes and houseboats.
1. Torture Museum
In an attractive town house by the Singel canal, I find myself immersed in a world of misery.
The eerie Torture Museum explains many of the sadistic methods of harm that have been used for centuries to punish or extract information from a person. Dimly lit chambers are filled with weapons, devices and confronting images.
Some tools are recognisable, such as the stocks: a wooden frame in which a person’s head and arms would be locked, to expose them to public humiliation. Others are sickening, designed to inflict extreme physical and psychological pain, such as the rack with a wooden board to which the victim would be attached by chains. The chains would be slowly winched to stretch the victim’s limbs then dislocate them.
This is not a museum to enter on a whim, but it does open a window onto the worst extremes of human behaviour.
