The fort is strangely shaped because it was built around a large boulder at the foot of Mount Nakhal.
Nakhal Fort - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakhal_Fort
Nakhal Fort is a large fortification in the Al Batinah Region of Oman. It is named after the Wilayah of Nakhal. The fort houses a museum, operated by the Ministry-------
"At that time, the Soviet Union was still intact, Ceausescu was still in power, and Iasi seemed remote and peculiar, like the end of the world. I stayed in a vast hotel where there were no other guests. The hotel staff kept moving me and my companion from room to room, the better to record our conversations. We changed money with an Arab student in the square, but then learned the best currency was not Romanian lei but Kent cigarettes. No one knew why Kent cigarettes and not, say, Malboro or Camel; that was just what one did in Iasi. Once, when we tried to visit a Romanian whose name was known in the West, plain-clothes police jumped out of the shrubbery and took our photographs with a large, black Instamatic camera. After that, comic-strip spies in trench coats and dark glasses followed us everywhere we went. To confuse them, we drove around in circles, and then set out from Iasi, driving as fast as we could, toward the Soviet border. We screeched to a halt near the blue village, and stopped to have a picnic while the men in trench coats and dark glasses sulked in their car nearby."
--from BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: Across the Borderlands of Europe by Anne Applebaum
--from BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: Across the Borderlands of Europe by Anne Applebaum
In the summer and fall of 1991, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain, took a three month road trip through the freshly independent borderlands of Eastern Europe. She deftly weaves the harrowing history of the region and captures the effects of political upheaval on a personal level. An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia—an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations. In reasserting their heritage, the inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their fractured ancestral legacies. In the process, neighbors unearth old conflicts, devote themselves to recovering lost culture, and piece together competing legends to create a new tradition. Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, BETWEEN EAST AND WEST brilliantly illuminates the soul of the borderlands and the shaping power of the past. READ an excerpt here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/between-east-and-west-…/
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