Until a few days ago, Zingem in East Flanders was a quiet village best known to its residents.
Today, it is making headlines around the world after a single EuroMillions ticket turned 21 friends into multimillionaires overnight.
According to Het Laatste Nieuws, the €123 million jackpot was validated at the Taerwe bakery in Zingem, where a group of friends had jointly filled in their numbers. Once the money has been divided, they are each set to receive €5.8 million.
What followed was an explosion of international media attention. From Germany and Spain to New Zealand, Taiwan and the Philippines, news outlets picked up the story of what has been described as a “Belgian fairy tale.”
Bought in a local bakery
The image of champagne corks popping in a small village bakery proved irresistible. HLN reported how the baker himself was invited to celebrate moments after the draw, while one of the winners told Belgian television he was still struggling to believe what had happened. Foreign media quickly followed suit: Germany’s Bild dubbed Zingem “the village of lottery millionaires,” while French and Austrian outlets echoed the same sense of wonder.
The story resonated far beyond Europe. Newspapers in Asia highlighted the scale of the win, with some describing the group as “billionaires” once the prize money was converted into local currencies. As HLN noted, it is rare for a Belgian lottery story to travel so widely and even rarer for a village of this size to suddenly find itself in the global spotlight.
The bakery in Zingem, Kruisem, where a group of players won the Euromillions lottery, Sunday 1 February 2026. Credit: Belga
Only two winners?
Behind the fairy-tale narrative, however, lies a more down-to-earth reality. As Het Nieuwsblad reports, Belgian law recognises only the holders of the physical ticket as official winners.
In this case, that role falls to the café owners who bought the ticket on behalf of the group. While the 21 friends have a written agreement to share the prize equally, the final distribution of the money depends on trust and cooperation within the group.
The winners seem unlikely to let the money go to their heads. One man whose father was one of the lucky winners told HLN: "Here in Zingem, you know. I don't think any of the winners are going to buy a Porsche. The winners are almost all retirees who have already had a good life. Yesterday there was a plan to create a WhatsApp group with all the winners, until it dawned on me that half of them don't have WhatsApp on their phones."
