Today was the day I fell in love with Malta. I think it may have been the very best day of the trip.
We had a good bike ride yesterday, but we did not feel like getting on the bike again. We decided that we would go to Victoria, the only real city on Gozo. We knew that there was a walled section of the city here, and we hoped it might be something like Mdina. Buses do not run quite as frequently on Gozo, so we were waiting in the hotel lobby until it was time to catch the bus. There was a old print of Gozo in the 1950’s on the wall. It does not all that much different now.
A young German couple was asking at the desk where they could rent bicycles. We impulsively just offered them ours for the day. They seemed a little uncertain at first if we really we were offering the for free, but they finally accepted with smiles. As we left on the bus, John and I decided that we either the nicest or the dumbest thing we have done in a while.
Victoria is not Mdina. It is more of a real town and the old section is still under extensive construction. But it was a fascinating place to spend the day. As we had read, there is a walled section in the middle of the city.
But these walls are still in the process of being rebuilt largely funding from the European Union.
I was a little surprised by all this work. I believe that the usual practice these days was to preserve things in their existing condition rather than trying to reconstruct what we think it used to be like. We roundly slam our nineteenth century forefathers for clumsily rebuilding Gothic cathedral and Greek temples. Could we be doing the same kind of vandalism here? Or does the need to increase tourist trump everything?
The old section is dominated by the cathedral. It is not a particular impressive edifice either outside or inside. The earthquake that destroyed Ragusa and Noto also destroyed the old cathedral here. They started to rebuild it in the grand baroque manner, but ran out of money.
The dome was never built, and there is a trompe l’oeil picture at the crossing above the high altar where the dome should be. That is the most interesting thing about the cathedral, but a there was a number of older women making sure that no tourists took pictures.
There were no pictures allowed either in the cathedral museum, but there was only one woman at the desk and she did not seem to particularly care. So we quietly snapped some pictures of charming shadow box of the Last Supper
and a really disturbing one of the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
The basement was filled with croziers, chalices, and pectoral crosses.
Apart from the pleasure to taking surreptitious photographs, there was not much of interest in this collection of ecclesiastic bric a brac. We went on to some of the other small museums. The history museum had prehistoric,
Roman,
Christian,
and folk art.
We also looked in the old jail and in a tiny natural history museum. The eighteenth graffiti on the walls of the jail was interesting. Although the Knights were supposedly a monastic order, they were apparently not a particularly devout group of young men. When drunken brawling resulted in death, offending knights were imprisoned here on Gozo. They evidently dreamed of a time when a ship would come and bring them back to Malta again.
We walked around the battlements now turning into restaurants.
Again, we noticed how much of it remains to be rebuilt and wondered how much of this would have been just rubble a decade ago.
We caught the bus back to our hotel and enjoyed some time in the rooftop pool.
We learned on our bike ride two days ago that tonight would be the festa in Kercem. But we also knew that it would not really start until around nine at night and that bus service would be finished by that time. So we talked to the clerk at the desk who made arrangements with a taxi driver to take us there and pick us up later on. As it turned out, the driver was from Kercem and even though he barely spoke English at all we could tell that he was delighted that American people were coming to his town for the festa. Still, when we arrived we wondered if maybe this was the wrong evening. The streets were absolutely deserted. We amused ourselves by taking photographs of the sacred and the profane, sometimes in the same picture.
We walked toward the center of town.
The parish church was packed and we could hear the sound of not only a chorus but a small orchestra. They were concluding their celebration with the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.
We thought that the festivities would start as soon as people left the church. But nothing at all seemed to happen. John asked one of the men sitting in the street when things would become lively. Not until about eleven, he said. We knew we had to leave for the airport in the middle of the night but we had no intentions of missing a festa. As it grew dark, the church was illuminated in gaudy colors
and the lights in the street came on.
More and more people steadily filled the streets. We finally convinced these young boys to pose in the jerseys that had been made specially for the occasion.
John stumbled across some guys with a vintage World War II American jeep and they insisted he get his picture taken in it.
Two complete marching bands started to assemble.
There were people sitting on every street corner.
