{"id":1046,"date":"2011-11-16T18:08:21","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T18:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/travelscribe.wordpress.com\/?p=1046"},"modified":"2011-11-16T18:08:21","modified_gmt":"2011-11-16T18:08:21","slug":"a-george-cross-marks-the-spot-sunday-telegraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/2011\/11\/16\/a-george-cross-marks-the-spot-sunday-telegraph\/","title":{"rendered":"A George Cross marks the spot (Sunday Telegraph)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My travel to the Middle East being somewhat curtailed by recent events (this is the first year in the past few that I&#8217;ve not visited Syria), I&#8217;ve had to travel a little nearer to home this year. But not too near &#8211; in October I went to Malta and Gozo, two islands which, though in Europe, sit pretty close to the North African coast. Gozo was beautiful and tranquil &#8211; and I&#8217;ll be writing about that island next year &#8211; and Malta was fascinating for its history and melange of culture and languages (a dialect of Arabic written in the Latin script, with a generous smattering of Italian \u00a0thrown in). Two great events shaped Malta&#8217;s history &#8211; the Great Siege by the Ottomans in 1565 and the Siege of Malta during World War II (1940-1942). The \u00a0Baroque architecture of its capital, Valletta, and the silent, ancient streets of its former capital, Mdina, enchanted me and I wrote about the cities in a piece just published by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/travel\/destinations\/europe\/malta\/8889218\/Valletta-Malta-A-George-Cross-marks-the-spot.html\">Sunday Telegraph<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My travel to the Middle East being somewhat curtailed by recent events (this is the first year in the past few that I&#8217;ve not visited Syria), I&#8217;ve had to travel a little nearer to home this year. But not too near &#8211; in October I went to Malta and Gozo, two islands which, though in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legacy.travelscribe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}