Today was the day I started to like Malta. This was scheduled as an “off” day for the bikes. We decided to go into Valletta and explore the capital city. It was a capital idea! Yesterday we discovered that the transit hub was only about 500 feet from the Dolmen hotel. And we also figured out that Google Maps seemed to have all the information we needed to take the bus. So after a quick and uninspiring breakfast, we walked over and found the bus headed towards the Valletta.
We arrived early so that John could go to a meeting. We found the place, with some difficulty, and I discovered that the Anglican cathedral was only a few steps away.
It obviously dated from the early nineteenth century when the precise difference between the Church of England and the Bank of England was not too clear to anyone. There was a English woman sweeping the porch. She invited me to come back at 11:00 for the service. This sounded interesting, and it left me about an hour or so to wander around the streets of Valletta on my own.
One of the defining architectural features of Malta are the window boxes build on the houses.
The main street of the city, Triq Republik, was festooned as if for some saints’ day. However, when I looked more closely, I noticed that the decorations were for the “Shopping” festa! Malta is one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, but I think in Valletta the worship of Mammon is paramount.
But God is not dead on this little island. Most of the churches were holding sevices and I avoided entering those churches out of respect. But I did look into some of the churches that we not celebrating Mass at the time. This was apparently the Jesuit church. I was surprised it was not even more baroque.
Around eleven o’clock, I returned to the Anglican cathedral. John was not yet finished with his meeting, so I send him a text telling him what I was doing. The church was surprisingly full. The choir of Oriel College Oxford was singing the service that morning. Although Oriel is one of the University’s oldest colleges, the apparently do not have a choral foundation of men and boys. Instead, this was a mixed choir of male and female students. They were good, but not exceptional. There was also a large Swedish youth group here. We were told that these were high school age students who were preparing for confirmation and apparently a trip to Malta was part of this. I suppose they were here to see where Saint Paul had spent the winter after his shipwreck though escaping the gray Swedish weather may have been the real attraction. John joined me about part way through the service. After it was done, he snapped picture of me by the baptismal font.
I sat by a woman I assumed to be Maltese during the Eucharist. After the service we saw her snapping some pictures of the church on her phone. “I guess you’re a tourist too!” John said. We all introduced ourselves. It turned out that she was from New York where she was a member of Saint Bartholomew’s. Her husband is the head of Episcopal Relief and Development, so not surprisingly he was at General Convention in Salt Lake City while she and her daughter were spending some time here in Malta.
John and I headed towards Triq Republik. We stopped at a cafe there for some quick bite. We saw a reminder of Malta’s 160 odd years as a possession of the British Crown.
From there we went off to explore the Palace of the Grand Master. For a couple hundred years, Malta was the property of the Knights of Saint John, one of the “military” orders of the Catholic church. During the crusades, this group started out supposedly protecting pilgrims headed towards the Holy Land. They operated shelters or “hospitals” along the way. This gave them the nickname of “Hospitalers.” But the crusaders were driven from Palestine by the Muslims, the the knights found themselves at first on the island of Rhodes and later here in Malta. The Turks made a rather spectacular effort to capture Malta in 1654, but failed to dislodge the Knights Hospitalers. The failure was most likely due to internal divisions among the Muslim forces, but the Christians ascribed the victory to Providence. After this victory, the Knights took transformed a fort on a small isthmus into a baroque city and named Valletta after the de Vallette, the French leader of the knights. From that time until another Frenchman named Napoleon successfully conquered Malta, the leader of the Knights, known as the Grand Master, was the ruler of the island and lived in a palace here in Valletta.
The palace is now a museum, though some of its rooms are used by the democratically-elected leaders of Malta on special occasions. Before Malta became a republic around 1974, it had been a dominion of the British Crown for about a decade. A picture of Queen Elizabeth is a relic of those days.
We wandered through elaborate halls
and looked out onto lovely courtyards.
There is a huge collection of armor here. This is not one of my biggest historical interests, but we thought we should take a look at it as it was part of the tour.
John loved this face mask.
But the palace of the Grand Master was not the only place to learn more about Malta’s past. We also looked into the Museum of Archeology. The Maltese are proud that the first monumental structure in Europe were built on these islands. We know remarkably little about the group called “The Temple Builders,” but we do know that long before the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge, huge stone buildings were erected here and they were beautifully decorated. There were examples here of some of the art work that has recovered from the temple sites such as this reclining woman. Could this be the inspiration for Henry Moore?
The group that followed the Temple Builders in the Bronze Age was hardly as advanced in either building or art. They did erect stone tables or “dolmen” and I presume our hotel is named after this archeological feature.
Although it was later afternoon, I was ready to look at another museum. But the day was pretty hot and John was tired, so he decided that we should go an cool off at a movie theater. For some reason, he decided that he wanted to see San Andreas. The movie was incredibly stupid, as both of us knew it would be, but the air conditioning did feel good.
As we came closer to sunset, we decided to do the Lonely Planet walking tour of Valletta. We started near the old main gate of the city. Renzo Piano, the great Italian architect, has created a new home for the Maltese legislature and redesigned the gate and the plaza.
The parliament building is made of the lovely local limestone. In the past, I have never quite understood why Piano is such a highly-regarded architect, but I I think this might change my opinion of him, too. It is a great building in a wonderful public space.
Right next to the Parliament building is what remains of the old opera house. The Germans and the Italians bombed Malta mercilessly from 1940 to 1942. The theater was destroyed, and right after the war rebuilding an opera house did not seem all that important. Today, the what remains has been carefully converted into a great outdoor theater.
Walking around the backstreets of Valletta, we saw things old
and not so old.
We decided to explore Siliema and Saint Julian, two of the newer neighborhoods of the city. These are located on the other side of the harbor, so we decided to take a ferry across. As we waited for the boat, we noticed fireworks.
We asked a woman waiting for the boat and she told us that this meant that there would be a “festa” or celebration for a saint’s day that evening.
We loved the site of Valletta bathed in the golden light at sunset.
We were unclear about what to do when we found ourselves on the other side of the harbor. I was for just finding someplace to have dinner and head home, but John wanted to find Paceville, the nightclub district of the island. We compromised a bit. John bought me a sausage, and I agreed to walk towards Paceville. We had only gone a few hundred yards, however, when we came upon the “festa.” This was a grand Catholic celebration
but the Anglo-American marching band had been added to the Tridentine rituals.
A large statue of the Virgin was being carried and procession. We looked at the image of Our Lady
and at the watching ladies, too.
Soon it was dark. The waterfront in Saint Julian is a lively place.
We found a restaurant that Lonely Planet had recommended and had a decent and reasonably-priced meal. We caught the bikes for home. Tomorrow will be our last day and we will be on the bikes again. I hope it will be as nice as today was. Like I said, I am beginning to like this country.
