Fort St. Angelo, Malta

A surprise card from dear Silvan.

I don;t know who is the actual photographer, but this whole series of cards has been taken from the same angle and I must admit that sometimes I get the feeling that it is the one same place on all of them...coz the fortifications just simply resemble one another...I mean, they are forificarions after all =)

This one here shows us the Fort of St. Angelo, which is right in the centre of the Grand Harbour.
And the back of the card says....The most impressive fortified position in the Grand Harbour, Fort St. Elmo, was the centre of the fighting that took place in the Great Siege of 1565. The fort is nowadays in the hands of the Knights of St. John whose flag proudly flies from the ramparts.
For a moment I got confused, how come now the back of the card is talking about a different fort, but I guess they just wanted to give us this history example...cos Wiki tells us about this point in history when Fort Saint Elmo was the scene of some of the most intense fighting of the 1565 siege, and during the bombardment of the fort, a cannon shot from Fort St Angelo across the Grand Harbour struck the ground close to the Turkish battery. Debris from the impact mortally injured the corsair and Ottoman admiral Dragut Reis, one of the most competent of the Ottoman commanders. The fort withstood the siege for over a month, falling to the Turks on 23 June 1565. None of the defending knights survived, and only nine of the Maltese defenders survived by swimming across to Fort St. Angelo on the other side of the Grand Harbour after Fort St Elmo fell.

So now it is all clear :)

wow! a SEPAC stamp!! It was issued this year in a set of two animals' stamps. It shows a wild rabbit, which is considered as a protected mammal in Malta.

Thanks a lot Silvan!!!