Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

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Manoel Island is named after the Portuguese Grand Master of the Knights of Malta António Manoel de Vilhena. In the 1720s, Manoel built a fort here (right) to make the capital Valletta “all the more impregnable in the face of infidel onslaughts.” The fortifications joined a lazaretto (left)—a quarantine facility cum hospital—that had operated on the island since the plague first hit its shores in the mid-17th century. As the name of their order suggests, the Knights Hospitaller who then ruled the Maltese archipelago were renowned for their medical expertise, having been founded to tend to sick or injured pilgrims in the Holy Land, so a clean bill of health from the Manoel Island lazaretto meant you were welcome in any Mediterranean harbour. Even after the Knights were expelled from Malta by Napoleon in 1798 and a subsequent uprising against the French saw Britain invited to govern the islands, Malta retained this reputation and the lazaretto served as a military hospital during the Crimean War. Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and Benjamin Disraeli are just a few of the illustrious patients to have been treated at the facility, which also served as a submarine base in WWII. Besides the remains of both the fort and the lazaretto, Manoel Island is today home to an extensive yacht marina and boatyard, and a sanctuary for ducks and other waterfowl.

This is my life meow.

All around Malta, if you look real close at the weatherworn walls you’ll find graffiti carvings of the various vessels that have visited, traded at and invaded these islands over the centuries, from traditional Mediterranean galleys to, like this one etched onto the National Library, a Royal Navy brigantine. It’s like a secret language that, once learnt, seems to call out to you everywhere. The ships are also intimately connected to another distinctively Maltese tradition: ex-votos. When sailors were confronted with disaster at sea, they often prayed to God for deliverance, vowing to make an offering to the Church if they survived. When they finally washed ashore, they would commission a painting of their ordeal alongside the letters V.F.G.A. for “Votum Fecit et Gratiam Accepit” (“a promise was made and the grace was given”) for the nearest chapel. These intricately carved craft, too, were thought to bring good luck in subsequent sea voyages for those who couldn’t afford to engage a professional artist.

“Dear, I know nothing of \ Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love \ Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur \ Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” . These are the colours of Malta: a horizontal tricolour of muted yellow limestone sandwiched between the deep blue of the Mediterranean and the azure sky. It’s a banner that follows your every step along these ancient shores, where buildings new and old are all made from the soft, porous rock and left unpainted to breath out the salty summer air and wintry rains. This entire island could be one elaborate sculpture chiseled over the centuries from a single limestone block, then lodged in the middle of the sea like the centrepiece of some impossibly grand fountain.

Daylight fires its final salvo into the limestone rock pools at the foot of Fort St Elmo’s seaward ramparts. In 1565 these embankments saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Great Siege of Malta, as Ottoman forces fought to take the strategic Sciberras Peninsula that divides Marsamxett and the Grand Harbour, commanding the entrance to both of the island’s main waterways. Not a single Knight of St John survived to see it fall into the enemy’s hands. Today it stands at the head of the capital Valletta, the haunt of dog-walkers, divers, stray cats blinking sleepily into the twilight, and fishermen standing still as the statues of saints you see on every street corner. Like so many places in Malta, it feels like two parallel worlds, past and present, draw breath in unison. As above, so below.

Under sail and on the trail — the Hong Kong I always miss most. See you in a year, HK frens (unless you come visit me in Malta!)

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