Annaschnitfink's Fotothing

Holland - Fort St. Aagtendijk
300 soldiers stayed in the fort and they had no privacy at all: this is their pissoir...

September = Fortification month in Holland
Our good friend Hans55 provided a tour with himself as a guide in Fort St. Aagtendijk on September 8th, 2007.
Since this fortification is only 10 km away from my home town IJmuiden, I went there by bike. A couple of years ago I visited fort IJmuiden, but I must say that also fort St. Aagtendijk proved to be very interesting, may be this was also caused by the great explanations Hans gave about almost everything we saw during the tour!
Thanks dear Hans: it was great!!!

Fort along the Sint Aagtendijk
is also part of the:
Stelling van Amsterdam or Amsterdam Defense Line. The city of Amsterdam (Holland's capital) is surrounded by a chain of forts, dams and sluices with a length of 135 kilometer. They were built in a very short period (in between 1880 and 1914) after the French-German war of 1870-1871. Their purpose was to protect Amsterdam. The principal idea was to flood the land surrounding Amsterdam. In a military sense the chain of fortifications, dams and sluices was 100 % effective, it was impossible to break through this defense line, until ... the arrival of aeroplanes. By this the whole system became completely and totally obsolete. Since it is a unique defense system in this part of the world it was put on the Unesco World Heritage List in 1996.
If you want more info:
http://www.stelling-amsterdam.org/english/index.htm
The info on this site is in Dutch and in English
De info op deze site is in het nederlands en in het engels.