Varchar "date" to real date?

Hello, This is propably a more of a MySQL question but here we go anyway... I have a DB that has dates stored in a table. The date field type is Varchar (don't ask why... :( The dates are stored using european date format DD.MM.YYYY. I need somehow convert the dates to the format MySQL uses (YYYY-MM-DD) and re-store them to a table which has a real date column for them. I think I need some help/ideas with this... If I can get this done how can I still display the dates in european format at my web page? Do I have to break the date to pieces and some how re-arrange it to the DD.MM.YYYY format or is the some clever function for this that can automatically do this? Thanks -Will