Two remarkable figures have recently found their niche on the market place: Oliver the Devil and Tanneken Sconyncx. Both statues are the work of the artist J. Claerhout from Tielt, and came into being on the initiative of the local historical circle ‘De Roede van Tielt’.

Olivier De Neckere (his name means ‘water sprite’ or ‘devil’) was born in 1434 in the barber-shop of his father on the marketplace of Tielt. Coincidence and a cunning nature made that this ordinary boy rose to be a barber and confidant-councellor of the French king Louis XI. But the death of the Spider King in 1483 also meant the tragic end of Oliver’s blitz career. One year later he was hanged on the gallows.

The antlers on the bronze statue refer to Oliver’s noble title: the fallow deer; the rope to the way he died; scissors and razor refer to his profession; in the back he is protected by a cross spider, an allusion to the Spider King.

The elegant bronze statue of the witch Tanneken Sconyncx represents the woman at the moment of her death. Slanderously accused of association with the devil, she succumbed in the Town Prison on 2nd June 1603, after months of torture.

For hundred years after her martyr’s death, she ascends as it were into heaven. She’s no longer a witch but neither a human being, for now she has become an angel. Her right wing not fully grown yet, she rises up from the earth and escapes from the pain and the false accusations. The rope that bound her during her agony is now hanging there aimlessly. In winds itself round the pillar, where some rats – diabolic according to the then prevailing superstition – look up to her avariciously.