Chipka. The small-town museum

CHIPKA is an exhibition that focuses on the special resonance of a foreign-sounding word. People have to be familiar with the Flemish town of Aalst to know the origin of the word: Chipka is the name of an artificial island that came about in the 19th century, after the river Dender was straightened, as part of an extensive industrialisation drive in that area. The word was a corruption of 'Shipka', a forbidding Bulgarian mountain pass, where czarist Russia beat Ottoman armed forces in 1877-1878. In popular speech, the battle symbolised resistance (to the non-Christian occupying forces), but also chaos and destruction. The newspapers in those days used to cover the battle in great detail, and the name that was given to the island curiously compared the fear for the Ottomans to the threat emanating from the unstoppable advent of new economic and technological forces. In that sense, Chipka stands for early, unhibited capitalism.