A common practice for old historic churches was to bury the dead under the Church. The Bovenkerk is no exception to this practice, where famous Dutch persons originating from Kampen are buried. One of them is
Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634), one of the first landscape painters of the 17th-century Dutch school, specialized in painting the Netherlands in winter. Another is Jan Bantjes (1700-1779) and Jacomina Leussen (1707-1770) who were wealthy landowners, shipowners, financiers of Berbice plantations and privateers. Their eldest son Gerrit (Jan Geerts) Bantjes (1734-1782) who left for the
Cape of Good Hope in Nov.1754 started a line of descendants who laid down prominent South African history such as the exploratory Kommissitrek of 1834 to Port Natal to find a new homeland for the Cape Boers, the Natal-land Report which started The
Great Trek (1837–38) and the battles that followed, the Discovery of the Witwatersrand Gold Reef in 1884 and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886. This same Bantjes line gave South Africa's first two presidents their grounding education and were instrumental in influencing the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) setting Germany and Great Britain on a collision course. Back to the church, the
transept contains a small ornament of red
marble with a green marble
urn in memory of Vice Admiral
Jan Willem de Winter (1761-1812). The heart of Vice Admiral De Winter is enclosed in this urn, while his body is buried in the
Panthéon in
Paris. == Gallery ==