The Citadel Gateways, Victoria, Gozo
Click on the Pictures for Enlargements

"From the battlement of the citadel, her back to the square and the church, Oonagh O'Dwyer stood and watched Rabat become Turkish. Like husked seed, the coloured turbans poured between the flat-roofed houses, the felt caps and camel-hair cloaks of the dervishes wild in the van, and the walls rattled with the screams of Allâh! Allâh! Al-hamdu lillah! as the Lions of Islâm broke through."
The Disorderly Knights, Part Two, Chapter Four
   
Rabat from the top of the Gran Castello Gateway
 Standing right above the historic main gate, my back to the square and the church, and looking down over Rabat (Victoria). Any Turks present were behaving with the utmost decorum.
The historic Gateway to the Citadel, rebuilt after the 1551 attack, and again after the Great Siege of 1565 (during which Gozo was not attacked)
 The Old Main Gate
The New Main Gate from inside the Gran Castello
Looking down from the corner of the Cathedral to the main gate of the citadel. The wall ahead on the right is the side of the Governor's house.

          "From the Governor's House on Gozo, her black hair hot on her shoulders, Oonagh O'Dwyer watched the striped sails, the twinkling ships come.
          High on its acropolis above the capital Rabat, the Gran' Castello, her lover's citadel, guarded the centre of Gozo, a three mile span of sharp hills and patchwork plains, of carob trees and low, square houses and stone terraces with the fishing nets drying and the gourds seated, green and yellow and fast as aldermen on their walls.
          To the south, beyond the sentinal cone of an extinct volcano, lay the short sea channel to Malta."
The Disorderly Knights, Part Two, Chapter Three

Taken from the main archway entrance to the Citadel, looking back toward Mgarr and over the sea to Comino (jutting into the picture from the left), and Malta (the low faint flat blue smudge halfway up the picture. Rabat, Comino and Malta

 

Updated 09 Jul 2001.
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