1/3 The chapel after a tree fell on it (left) and how the building looks now (right) (photo: Erik Peeters).
As if he had never been away, the bell chimes again in the Sint Antoniuskapel in Lepelstraat. The house of worship was destroyed last summer when a tree fell on it during a heavy thunderstorm. Volunteers have been working for months since then to restore the pride of the village.
The exterior of the chapel is almost complete. The roof will be put on in the coming weeks. “We have been delayed considerably due to the bad weather, but now we are going well,” says Stan Kint of the Friends of the Antonius Chapel Foundation.
“In the arches are the existing stained-glass windows that miraculously were spared.”
The new chapel was largely built with leftover materials from the ‘old’ chapel from 2000. “We left the part that was still good. The rest is bricked up with clean chipped and new stones. The existing stained glass windows have been placed in the arches, which have miraculously been spared,” explains volunteer Cees de Kock.
Next to the chapel, a piece of the trunk of the fallen tree has also been put back in place. Stan: “We want to show what natural disasters can do. Later there will be a plaque with a photo of the old chapel with a poem about what happened.”
“We don’t want to go through this a second time.”
The reconstruction of the Antonius Chapel will cost around 24,000 euros. Thanks to various fundraising campaigns in the village, the required amount has been more than collected. “We even have some money left over that we want to spend on topping the other trees around the chapel. We don’t want to go through this a second time,” explains Stan.
The inhabitants of Lepelstraten would have preferred to reopen their ‘kapelleke’ on 13 June, the name day of Saint Anthony. That’s not going to work. It will probably be early September now. But now that the bell will soon be ringing again in Lepelstraat, there is no rooster crowing about it.
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