There’s something about islands that evokes a deep kind of wonder — and a deeper kind of resilience.
Malta’s not a country that shouts. It doesn’t have the scale or the swagger of Italy, or the gloss and glamour of the French Riviera. It’s small, sure — an unassuming dot on the map. But that dot’s been holding the line for centuries. Against weather, war, colonisers, corruption — whatever the century’s thrown at it.
In fact, Malta’s resilience once changed the course of history.
During the Second World War, this little island found itself again under siege — starving, battered, out of options. Operation Pedestal — a desperate, near-impossible convoy mission — was launched to get supplies through. Against all odds, one ship, the SS Ohio, limped into the Grand Harbour, practically held afloat by the ships on either side of her. Maltese people cheered, half in relief, half in disbelief. My grandfather, a 7 year-old boy, was one of them in that crowd. If the Ohio hadn’t made it, Malta might have fallen. And if Malta had fallen, everything else — North Africa, the Mediterranean campaign — could have unravelled.
If that ship hadn’t come in, I might not be here to write this.
There’s a particular kind of strength that comes from geography. Malta’s been in the middle of everything and has belonged to no one for very long. It’s been used, celebrated, bombed, sold off, built up, and left behind — sometimes all in the same decade. The land remembers all of it. You see it in the way the limestone wears its age. In the way the buildings refuse to be modern, even when they try.
It’s imperfect. But it’s not trying to be anything else. And that’s where the resilience sits. In the contradictions. In the fact that you can be standing in a UNESCO World Heritage site and still smell frying pastizzi and hear someone shouting over a football match from a window with laundry flapping in the breeze. That’s Malta. History and mess and pride, all jammed in together.
And when you look at the geography — a rock with barely any fresh water, blistering summers, and a location that’s made it both vital and vulnerable — you realise that the real miracle isn’t survival. It’s the way this place keeps shaping itself around the chaos, again and again.
Solid. Undeniably solid.
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