At Herengracht 96 there was room for everything at last: worship, classes, gatherings and the Govinda’s vegetarian restaurant. From 1975 the Sunday Love Feasts brought in crowds, while Dutch-language books and traveling parties carried the work across Holland and Flanders. For a few years the community seemed to grow in every direction at once.
Then came November 14, 1977. Srila Prabhupada left this world in Vrindavan, and grief ran through the whole movement. Administrative changes followed, among them zonal initiating regencies under the Governing Body Commission. In Amsterdam the mood changed with them: distribution targets rose, and life on the traveling parties grew harder.
By 1979 the city was proving too small and too expensive. High property costs put rural land in the Dutch polders out of reach for cow protection, and more householders were looking for a settled life in the country. The answer lay across the border: Château de Petite Somme, a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic castle set among the woods of Durbuy, in Belgium.
It became Radhadesh. Experienced builders, cooks and pujaris left Herengracht 96 in substantial numbers for Wallonia, closing one chapter of the Amsterdam story and opening another in Belgium. Not everything was settled, though: for those who stayed behind in Amsterdam, the pressures and difficulties remained.
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Short previews with videos of the chapters of The Amsterdam Adventure book.