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Colombo, anno 1672, map of the fort, Baldaeus, copperengraving Historic Colombo Fort Map of the fort and the city of Colombo.- 1672 Plate size: 29x35 cm., the printed area in very good conditon, only on margins some small tears and a little brownish. The business district of Colombo, with Government buildings, banks and other commercial ventures, 5 star hotels and department stores, is still called Fort , because that is what it once was. The Fort of Colombo, which like Jaffna and Galle was really a fortified town, was demolished around 1870 in the interest of urban development, soon followed by most of the buildings within it. Today nothing is left but its shape in aerial photographs, the regular grid pattern of the streets, some parts of the walls, the hospital, the lonely Delft Gate that is now a useless passageway hidden among modern high-rise, hardly recognizable parts of the Governor s House, and some odds and ends, like an ugly and lost little warehouse in the harbour. Of course today the historical remains are more appreciated, as monuments to history and sites of tourist interest, so most of the buildings that do remain have recently been renovated. The most important ones are located outside the original Fort area, such as the Dutch Period Museum and the Wolfendhal Church. After taking the Portuguese fort of Colombo in 1656, the Dutch partially demolished it, and restructured and improved the western part, taking advantage of the natural strength of the location between a lake and the sea. On the landside there was a wide moat connected to the lake which was infested with crocodiles, and beyond that the Pettah arose, the old city . The old Portuguese walls and bastions were demolished there. The Fort was connected with the Pettah via Koningsstraat, now Main Street, which started at the Delft Gate, or East Gate, crossed the moat by a draw bridge, ran between the sea and the Pettah and ended at Kayman s Gate, where a Portuguese gate used to be. From there the road led along the Kelani River to Hanwella. There were nine bastions: Leiden, Delft and Hoorn on the landside, Den Briel and Amsterdam on the Westside, and Rotterdam, Middleburg, Kloppenburg and Enkhuizen on the southern side. On the west side, on a promontory to the north, were two batteries: the Battenberg battery and the Waterpas battery. On the north side, protected by the batteries, was the harbour, which was not much more than an open road, as there was no bay here. Due to the monsoons the harbour was safe only from December to April. The other eight months of the year the ships had to go to Trincomalee and Galle. On the east side, the land between the moat and the Pettah could be flooded by opening the sluice of the lake, which is now called Beira Lake, possibly from de Beer , which was the name of the sluice. The Colombo Fort was a walled city, with administrative and military buildings, as well as cinnamon storehouses, mills, a parade ground, a church, residential buildings, and stalls for horses and elephants. The streets were planted with rows of trees for shade. The houses both inside the fort and in the Pettah were based on the standardised ground floor plans that had evolved from the houses in Holland but had been adapted to the tropical climate to provide shade and ventilation. They had an extended roof covering a veranda to keep the windows in shade, widely spaced masonry columns, a door with a tall decorated fanlight, a high-ceilinged hall with doors leading to the bedrooms, and a living area leading to a back veranda and a paved courtyard with trees, enclosed by wings projecting from the house. The houses were usually one storey high, and had white-washed walls and red-tiled roofs that usually suffered much from the attentions of crows and monkeys. In 1694 some 400 families were living in Colombo, with an average number of 8 persons per family, which included slaves, who accounted for slightly more than half of the population. Of the re. Seller Inventory # 9523
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