Menin Gate
war memorial in Ypres, Belgium
The Menin Gate (Dutch: Menenpoort), officially the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, is a war memorial in Ypres, Belgium, dedicated to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown. The memorial is located at the eastern exit of the town and marks the starting point for one of the main roads that led Allied soldiers to the front line.
Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and built by the Imperial War Graves Commission, since renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Menin Gate Memorial was unveiled on 24 July 1927. In early 2023, the monument was closed for extensive restoration works. The work was completed in Spring 2025.
Background
In medieval times, the original narrow gateway on the eastern wall of Ypres was called the Hangoartpoort, "poort" being the Dutch word for gate. During the 17th and 18th centuries, while under the occupation of the Habsburgs and the French, the city was increasingly fortified. Major works were completed at the end of the 17th century by the French military engineer Sebastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban.
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the eastern exit simply cut through the remains of the ramparts and crossed a moat. The gateway was by this time known as the Menenpoort, or Menin Gate in English, because the road leading through the gateway led to the small town of Menen.
“Menin Gate” enters the record as war memorial in Ypres, Belgium. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Menin, Gate and memorial can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1822397. Authority coordinates are 50.852, 2.891. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2023, 2025 and 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “Menin Gate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.