Unbelievable but true

The concrete pavements on Triq Durumblat (of Flower Power fame) in Mosta had not yet had time to dry up completely before the jiggers came back to tear them up again. They started on the corner with Triq il-Kbira and have torn up pavements further down up to the cemetery, so far.

After a year and a half of disruption to the busy Mosta traffic, we’re back to square one with wardens again controlling traffic near the destruction sites as Durumblat goes down to one lane.

Where’s our local council, if I may ask. I guess the retort is the contractor is paying, don’t worry. Yeah right, but what about the inconvenience for us drivers who thought Durumblat was done and dusted after a year-and-a-half of traffic bedlam?

Victor Formosa – Mosta

Bad myths die hard

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem, a tapestry designed by Domenico Paradisi, ca. 1689-93

I am glad that Alan Cooke (June 5) and perhaps more readers appreciated my effort to clear up a lot of confused history about the Crusades. But he should go further and get an insight into the spirit of the age.

I concede that, maybe, their mistake was the belief that a pilgrimage to the Holy Land would absolve even of the most terrible sins. On a higher level,  it was the concept that all the faithful soldiers of Christ who die in battle would find their reward in heaven.

Despite the great distances and the limited means of transportation, pilgrimages to Jerusalem were surprisingly common. But the emperors and the popes were well informed that many pilgrims were seized and sold into slavery while others were tortured often seemingly for entertainment.

Those who survived these perils returned to the West weary and impoverished with a dreadful tale to tell: centuries of gruesome torture, vile desecration of churches, altars and baptismal fonts, murder and rape and hell let loose.

As Cooke very well wrote, the Holy Land regrettably became a bloodbath. The crusades were compellingly precipitated by centuries old Islamic provocations, persistent bloody attempts to colonise the West and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. They were certainly not conducted for land, loot and converts.

To further exculpate the Christian world from all that violence, it is worth noting that, towards the end of the 12th century, even had the pope and emperor been cynical promoters, they would not alter the motivation of the crusaders for that entirely depended on what the knights believed. But these were a military organisation.

Will this ill-conceived conception take as much time to be obliterated as Galileo Galilei’s theory of the earth? He is still not vindicated because we still say “sunrise and sunset” after all those centuries.

John Azzopardi – Żabbar

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