Travel Day 924 – Fort Cochin, Kochi, Kerala, INDIA
After staying in Fort Cochin for quite a while, one question still kept bugging me when I walked around: Where the heck was the fort in Fort Cochin?
Portuguese Fort Tiracol by Goa in India
I had been walking all over the place already during my time in Kochi, but I never came across any traces of an actual fort. All I could ever find was a cannon here or there placed on a wall, suggesting where the fort once might have been. But since they were rather lousy attempts of actually showing anything about the fort, they couldn’t really be taken seriously…
So what was I looking for that was more serious? From my experience, normally Portuguese settlements used to have a separate fort next to the town as I had seen in Fort Tiracol by Goa for example, bere here this didn’t seem to be the case and I found the only kind of reliable information in the Mattancherry Dutch Palace museum today…
Cannon on a Wall where the Fort once stood
About one week ago I had only been to the exterior of this Portuguese built palace and today I finally took the time to stroll through the interior of the building and I even visited the Indo-Portuguese museum in Fort Cochin. While the Indo-Portuguese museum was mainly concerned about the Romam Catholic church, the basement revealed one little corner of the original foundation was of the Portuguese Fort Emmanuel…
More relatable evidence about the fort in Cochin I could find in the amazingly detailed Mattacncherry Dutch Palace. It not only had incredible wall paintings of scenes from the Ramajana and other Hindu mythology, but it also had some decent historical maps on display that suggested the entire outline of an entire city Fort Emmanuel, built by the Protuguese…
Cannon on a Wall, but not the Fort Emmanuel
Contrary to my initial expectation, Fort Cochin had actually been a fortified city rather than just a stand alone fort and after consulting my current map of the city, I could retrace a vague outline of the fort by the shape of the current street layout. As the history of Kochi, which was basically the first Portuguese stronghold in India, progressed, the Dutch apparently interfered, took over the city and destroyed the Protuguese fort. This was followed by the Dutch building a new, smaller fort and the British taking over while completely destroying the Dutch fort in return…
But according to some fellow travelers from Portugal, who I had dinner with at the end of the day, the Portuguese simply took the fort home with them when they decided to “give” Kochi to the Dutch. That was probably precisely what had happened and so I finally found the answer of where the fort was in Kochi. It was obviously back home in Portugal… : )
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