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a trip to Malta
August 2018
It was a short trip, very short indeed, just a break in my tour of Sicily. It left me fascinated with this beautiful and particularly miserable island, enslaved by the crusaders, made a sort of monk colony for psychopath scions of noble families of Europe, and then colonised by English, who treated its population, speaking a peculiarly picturesque variant of Arabic, just in the same way as they did with any other natives of the empire.
Today, Malta is part of the European Union, and one of the few countries, together with Poland, where abortion is illegal. Slouching through history under the burden of its Catholicism.
The place fascinated me nonetheless, and I left the bookshop in the main street of Valletta with a heavy bag of books recounting the archipelago's peculiar history, books in Maltese as curios, and some learning material to get familiar with the language. I couldn't resist it; as a variant of Arabic mixed with Italian, it appealed strongly to my instincts. It waits for its improbable moment in my flat in Krakow. And I wish I could come back one day, perhaps for longer, to this quintessence of the Mediterranean.
It was a short trip, very short indeed, just a break in my tour of Sicily. It left me fascinated with this beautiful and particularly miserable island, enslaved by the crusaders, made a sort of monk colony for psychopath scions of noble families of Europe, and then colonised by English, who treated its population, speaking a peculiarly picturesque variant of Arabic, just in the same way as they did with any other natives of the empire.
Today, Malta is part of the European Union, and one of the few countries, together with Poland, where abortion is illegal. Slouching through history under the burden of its Catholicism.
The place fascinated me nonetheless, and I left the bookshop in the main street of Valletta with a heavy bag of books recounting the archipelago's peculiar history, books in Maltese as curios, and some learning material to get familiar with the language. I couldn't resist it; as a variant of Arabic mixed with Italian, it appealed strongly to my instincts. It waits for its improbable moment in my flat in Krakow. And I wish I could come back one day, perhaps for longer, to this quintessence of the Mediterranean.
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