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Sint Nicolaas receives Fellowship at Roosevelt Academy

Visit after landfall in Middelburg


Tags: Excerpts from the Windmill

MIDDELBURG - The Roosevelt Academy in this Zeeland provincial capital has bestowed the first ever Visiting Honorary Fellowship on Dutch icon Sint Nicolaas. Recently the saint - affectionately known as well as ‘Sinterklaas’ in the Netherlands - arrived in the country via the city of Middelburg in an event televised throughout the country.

Prior to the ceremony at the Academy, Sinterklaas had been greeted by throngs of people at the Middelburg inland port, after which he wad a tour on horseback through parts of the downtown area.

In his speech to Sinterklaas, the Dean of the Academy mentioned that students at the Roosevelt Academy are known to be ‘hard workers, very inquisitive, internationally orientated and extremely tuned in to society’. Hans Adriaansens said that Sinterklaas also has all of these qualifications and more and thus was the best-ever person to be awarded this special new honor.

The Roosevelt Academy is an international university college located in the wellknown gothic city hall of Middelburg. It is linked to the University of Utrecht and offers courses in Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science to about 600 students, mostly Dutch or Flemish.

The Academy was named after the famous Roosevelt family, who hailed originally from the island of Tholen in the Province of Zeeland. The family eventually included two American presidents: Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Middelburg also is host to the Roosevelt Study Center which was founded in 1986 and has since become a leading research institute in Europe, specialized in Dutch-American relations and in American political and cultural history.