Gozo

Over to Gozo. It's noticeable that the familiar 3-chambered temple/nuraghi design we have seen in Sardinia and at Skorba (and extended at Ta Hagrat) was further developed at Xhagra - here, the two buildings, side by side, have five and four room-sized niches. Some of these at least had shelves or tables, and parts of the floor are still equipped with splendid flooring, paved with smooth stones.  No signs of any passages inside the walls, let alone staircases to take you up to a viewing point or rooftop. The roofs have completely gone.... speculation is that these were timber or plant-based. 

    

The corbelling of the wall-to-ceiling is as good as any we’ve seen, though at Xhagra there is some corbelling on the outside of one of the buildings, which the authorities have taken to be a sign of instability… it’s propped up with scaffolding, but it looks pretty intentional to me. The question would be, was there another room out there? Seems unlikely. I don’t know!

Here they found such treasures, in the late 20th century digs - stone-age pottery with inscribed designs such as this bird - maybe a Northern Lapwing.  And many fat ladies, and seated figures, and bowls, and beads and so on.  (The earlier digs, throughout the 19th century were so badly done that most of what was found has been lost, destroyed, eroded, or somehow vanished. Some excellent drawings and watercolours remain, which they've used to reconstruct the extant displays). 

Initial disappointment that the museum shop at Xhagra had been closed for health reasons (‘we’ve come all this way! I want to buy some replica goddesses!’) was later assuaged by finding the archaeology museum in Victoria’s amazing Cittadella open, and with similar figurines for sale. Phew!   Sadly, I could not see a replica of the remarkable little temple-model which was found at Hagrat. That throws light on the whole culture of building huge expensive difficult structures in the stone age, before alphabets.  How on earth did they do it? 

I am feeling a bit twitchy about the curtailed nature of the explanations at all these places. No mention of birth-giving and its perils, in other words, life!  They focus on the burials and later cremations and say it was a centre for a death cult. No understanding of the spirals, which are cyclical symbols - about fertility and divine or magic femininity.  No overt mention of the lack of weapons. Barely a thought for the female half of society… even though there are these dozens and dozens of female figurines, and even then they say some of them could be male. No mention of astronomical alignments - solstices etc.  They talk about the landscape, the location being chosen for its usefulness - access to fresh water, good land - but without any sense of any interaction between the powers and rituals of the ‘temple’ and its influence in that landscape…. The site of Xhagra is pretty good, on a southish-facing slope, with a view of hills and valleys, and the sea and Malta.  A place for renewal and hope, extending benevolence over a whole visible district.   The tone of all the interpretations is dry, dull, obvious, practical, modern.  

One object in the visitor centre stood out to me: the skull of a young woman which was used by scholars at the University of Dundee for a reconstruction. She emerges as a beautiful - almost instantly recognisable person. It’s a triumph of anatomical creativity… but the main thing is her actual teeth! They are perfect, shining, unblemished.  Whatever she ate, she had no caries.  Would that mine were like that.

  

By the way, the Cittadella at Victoria (Gozo’s capital) is a mini-city on the hill top a bit like a sunny Gormenghast, with fantastic buildings of many eras, another place which UNESCO has its eye on.  In 1551 when the Turks overran the island, people only escaped enslavement by shimmying down a huge terrifying wall and cliff to escape. Agh! Lots of museum-y bits were closed, but it’s so extensive and attractive we didn’t mind. 

I will make a note about how we go about, in our little hired car. It is a blessing to us fuddy-duddies to be driving on the left. We stop for lunch out wherever we are, and find the menus tempting - quite Italian in influence with pasta and pizza as well as Maltese specialities such as rabbit and fish.  The portions are huge!  We come home to have (if anything) a picnic style light supper.   We failed to buy milk from a supermarket yesterday as there were long queues to get IN!  You're only allowed in if someone comes out.  The panic and generalised mob reaction to the coronavirus is unsettling.  Who knew that there was a world-wide preoccupation with bum-wiping? (I thought it was just me). The ferry to and from Gozo is quick and efficient - you only pay coming back to Malta. 

Valletta - first visit

Three strong impressions from the day….

One, that we misread the mapping from the phones, compounded by the very unfamiliar place names. We had planned to get the little ferry into Valletta from suburb/outlier of the community of Sliema - just for the fun of it.  Inadvertently we drove into Valletta itself, found a parking place far far along the rough track by the sea under the fortifications, and jumped on the ferry only to find ourselves on the wrong side of the water and not in Valletta at all!   I report this because it shows how easily one can believe one’s own assumptions: I thought we were in Sliema, when the mapping clearly showed the directions (N/S) were all the wrong way round and still I didn’t twig. Not till the lady in the Tourist Info at Sliema told us, did we understand. She said there was nothing to see in Sliema - just shopping malls and commercial buildings. We saw Mothercare (closed now in the UK), M&S, Accessorize, HSBC, Matalan, etc etc, none of which were of any interest to us. The quayside is clean and tidy, and being upgraded to provide smoother and swifter passenger experience for those embarking on the various tourist and ferry boats.

Two: that Valletta is a really lovely place to be. The grid-pattern of streets up and down over the great ridge is surrounded by massive fortifications around the sea wall, and with at least a few quaint place-names reassuring to a Brit abroad - Old Bakery Street, Merchants Street, Windmill, etc.   

          

The architecture is really interesting, with great examples from all the preceding centuries, and lots of swagger. There are humble artisan dwellings, palazzos, statuary, balconies, churches, greater and lesser squares, dark alleys, a comfortable international atmosphere, lots of cafes with all the benefits of the Italian cuisine, and (oh dear) that comforting British smattering of signs and telephone boxes. We felt at home. I particularly liked the tradition of the decoration on the corners of buildings, looking like piles of sandwiches.

     

We strolled about, found lunch (Maltese rabbit stew for milord, and meagre fish for me).  I had forgotten that Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to live here (1804/5) and later a friend prompted me to seek out the Carravaggio  paintings. We will go back before we leave Malta to find them.  The whole city - like the whole island - represents the full history of Europe, and the present crisis (coronavirus, supremacy of fascism/banking culture, digital take-over of old ways of doing things). And, this could be one of the most fortified cities in Europe too, with fortresses and barracks and towers and huge walls dominating every part of the scenery, especially at the waterfront.    Collecting our car, we laughed at the huge rocky potholes which create a kind of terrible game for any drivers who’ve crept down there, past the old fishermen’s dock, and round the headland facing into the easterly winds.

  

Three: I wanted to get into the National Museum of Archaeology to better understand the Neolithic and maybe Bronze Age history of Malta, and I found it so overwhelming that I can scarcely begin to describe its treasures.   I had heard of the Fat Ladies of Malta, but had no idea of how many there are, or how fat.  Over the past few years, I have built up a small collection of replica ‘goddesses’ from Greece, the Cyclades, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Spain, France, Germany, the Balkans, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, etc etc., and developed a sense of how widespread and ‘ordinary’ or humdrum these little figures often were.  To me they were at least partly some kind of talisman against the perils of childbirth, and a celebration of sex and fertility, and the idea of the earth as a female thing.  Adorned with or accompanied by spirals, archways, sometimes stars and those ‘hooked diamonds’, they had a universality, and their placement in locations such as Newgrange with its solstice alignments showed how informed the people of the late Ice Age were. They all come from a time long before writing of any kind, and indeed before weapons were even thought of. Along with scrapers and hooks and needles, they were just part of the toolkits needed to survive, spiritual spanners, personal portraits.     

But the Maltese ‘Ladies’ are so remarkable even in their fragmentary condition, they outshine most of the rest.  They celebrate a colossal corpulence. They do seem to be female (though one note says they may also include males… I didn’t see that, but still….).  For some reason, vast oozing fatness was an important aspect - at least for some time.  Some of the figurines are just female and not fat.  One at least has nine little marks on its back, perhaps counting the months of pregnancy.  Many have the triangular delineations of the pubic area.  Some are headless, or seem to be made to have different heads attached to them.  Some were found beside or on top of blocks of stone decorated with spirals or interlacing circular C-shaped whorls.  But mostly, staggeringly, they were fat.  Were these fat women depictions of Mother Earth? Of a goddess? Of priestesses? We don’t know. So much of the archaeology was done in the 1920s - clumsy and inadequate we think now, in the face of more recent technical methods of analysis.  But it was all pre-writing - so there are no records, or even myths or legends.   The people who made the temples and carvings and clay figurines seem to have come to Malta from Sicily, and they were farmers.   There was a long gap before the Bronze Age people arrived - and nothing to explain why the Stone Age people disappeared…. they don’t seem to have been the same people.  The Bronze Age brought weapons, and male deities… the old mothering earth cults just faded away into nothing.   I felt overwhelmed by all this, what it could all mean, and calmed myself by doing some drawings - very quick - of some of the exhibits. 

      

    

In the Museum, they have banned cash exchanges (cards only), and no audio guides, because of the virus. So I may have missed a lot of information which has been gleaned since the quite wordy information boards beside the exhibits. I bought three more replica ‘goddesses’, of poor quality but at least attempting to describe the shapes of the females found in the stony fields between the wars.  There is also a repro model of the cart-ruts which have baffled historians, and which we failed to find on Day 1, with a very good video made by British archaeologist Dr David Trump who seems to have devoted his life to the treasures of the island.   Seeing him wipes away a lot of the pain and misery inflicted by his namesake. There are good Trumps, too.

At the supermarket back at Mellieha, there was pandemonium. Whereas the day before it had all been quiet and orderly, we found it heaving with people with trollies and baskets overflowing. The queues stretched right through the store.  Apparently the government has announced the closure of all schools, so that set everyone off into sensible/panic mode. It took us nearly 25 minutes of queueing to buy a loaf and a bar of chocolate. Eheu!

Who invented steps?

We come to rely on systems, and then when they fail we go back into the old ways of doing things. Arriving here on Tuesday, my mobile phone wouldn’t connect properly - no mapping. So we used Andrew’s which was working ok in that respect although I am wretchedly unfamiliar with its controls and habits… Still it got us to our destinations, and meanwhile I started to look at the road map I had had to buy at the airport. Three euros.  (They give you a very good free one when you pick up your hire care in Ireland. Same company, different generosity).  This 3€ map is printed on glossy thin paper and after being opened and folded a few times started to give way on the folds, and a remarkable amount of information on it is printed in such minuscule font that you can barely see it. It’s so bad, it’s almost worth starting a collection of bad maps to show up its uselessness.  

Anyway, with a week in front of us and no particularly pressing priorities, I asked if we could call in to see two temple complexes not far from where we are staying: Skorba and Ta’ Hagrat. These lie off the road we had taken to get to Mellieha, so with Andrew’s phone and my silly map it was easy-peasy.   I should say, getting familiar with place-names is not so straightforward because they are mostly rather Arabic, though spelled in Roman alphabet.  We had just about picked up that ‘Triq’ = road, or street, and that’s all. 

We found Skorba really easily and wandered in, through an open wire gate, but a man in a shed said we needed tickets and sent us back to ‘the bar on the corner’. The bar (at 11am) was chockablock with local people, almost all of whom were eating huge meals - spaghetti, lasagne, stewed rabbit, vast hamburgers.  The owner was frantically serving coffee from a large urn at the back of the bar, which was heated with a blazing gas burner.  He shouted out ‘Tickets?’ to us in a cheerful voice and then told us to wait while he dished up more coffees to people clustered at the counter.  We ordered coffees too, and he gave us our tickets and we went back to the the temple. 

    

The site is a small area, fenced off, about the size of a tennis court, and filled with a jumble and cluster of rocks and boulders; some are standing. It was apparently only excavated in the 1960s, and so had the benefit of modern analysis for the finds - they had discovered carbon-dating by then, whereas most other sites had been dug into in the 1920s or earlier, and so those places remain mysterious in some (almost all) respects. Skorba provided more solid dating evidence, which illuminated the rest of the island’s treasures. The published dates on the information boards are contradictory and awkward, nonetheless.   What’s clear is that there was first some kind of settlement, then a ‘temple’ which had the now-familiar triple-chamber layout, and that was much later adapted and changed, and then - who knows?  Here they found a beautiful goddess figurine, with breasts and a pubic triangle. The man did not know where this is now - presumably in the National Museum.   He had cut the grass around the stones, and it lay withering in the sun.  

We went on to the next temple - Ta' Hagrat.  Again, a wire fence, a man in a hut. He was Russian.  He asked to see our tickets, wanted to know when and where we had bought them. On inspection it seemed our tickets were dated 5th December last year, and expired on 4th March but he let us in anyway.   We were the only people there.  He said, moodily, people complain the temple is very small.   Actually it is not small, though it is cramped by its modern boundaries, and is placed on the side of a valley with nice views. This site is about twice the size of Skorba.  Here again is a jumble of stones, hard to make out at first.  This was just a farmer’s field until 1916 - he had moved a couple of great stones out of the way, and the archaeologists put them back where they thought they should go in the 1920s….The caption says "They increased the verticality of the entrance". That's a strange expression. It 'might' have been very low, like the doorways in the Sardinian nuraghi, or the great mounds at Newgrange in Ireland. It’s hard to say if their reconstruction is right, and we will never know.

   

But - my goodness! Here is something!  What they made was a really large impressive doorway, approached by a flight of massive steps. These are thought to be the earliest steps found, or something.   Now, this is a bit of a thrill for me, because I do wonder who invented steps.  I asked on Facebook and Twitter last year, and no-one answered. I know, I know, this is one of those questions which everyone thinks is so bleeding obvious that it’s ridiculous… but like all useful things, steps had to start somewhere. Any rocky slope may have inspired the idea, but someone, at some point, got other people to lug blooming great rocks into place to  create an even and easy walkway up or down.  This little flight of stones at Ta’ Hagrat may be the first one, or one of the first.  No goddess figurine found here, but at Ta’ Hagrat they found a remarkable little model temple carved in stone.  These structures and artefacts have their origins about 5000BC… the late Stone Age. Thus, they predate the Copper Age and the Bronze Age, when tools were changed into weapons, and the goddess gave way to a series of increasingly violent and assertive egoistical gods.   I have to be very wary of leaping to these conclusions, and they are not really conclusions but questions.  The layout at Ta’ Hagrat is even more strikingly 3-chambered… once symmetrical, then altered with a different alignment so that the right-hand chamber was elongated and became the entrance for three more smaller chambers…  

This is all very reminiscent of the nuraghi in Sardinia - but there, of course, the entrances for these Stone Age structures are really small, vaginal.  And they (like the Newgrange mounds) have small window over the doors, to let the winter solstice sun into the interiors.   This great doorway at Hagrat is now utterly different - but it was made in the 1920s, so who knows what it was like originally?   The moody Russian in the hut did not know about the nuraghi, but was interested.  He too had cut the grass which was drying in the sun. But some spectacular wildflowers were sprouting up, as everywhere... so beautiful. 

    

We headed back north, to view the spectacularly beautiful bay at Ghajn Tuffieha, which has a Gaia Peace Grove at the top of the cliff (complete with graphic warning signs of how dangerous it is on the crumbling edge).     We walked down the long long flight of steps (renewed at the lower end) to the beach and had lunch in a pretty little terrace bar under the terrifying cliffs. The tables have rough patterns carved into them, so reminiscent of the Hooked Diamond shape I love (the ancient textile design which goes back to the Stone Age) that I took it to be a sign of encouragement from my Goddess .... and then I found more on some decorative treetrunk sculptures near the pay desk.... though these came from Bali and have absolutely no connection with Malta other than fashionable stylishness.....

    

So, eschewing the long flight of steps, we strolled back up the old pathway which is evidently a river in the wet season.  We then went in search of the famous cart-ruts at the top of the Dingli cliffs, which have mystified historians… again dating from the Stone Age, they are ground into a rocky surface and may have been made by wheeled vehicles near some quarries, but their pathways are pretty random. We found the main area, but did not find the ruts, which was intensely disappointing…. (will have to go back).  The rocky surface looks pretty organic to me, with variations of surface looking entirely natural (memories of O-Level Geography, limestone pavements).    At some point in the afternoon, my phone started providing mapping but neither that nor the failing folding 3€ map showed us where the ruts are.  All I have is a small photo in a guide book.  

We dawdled home, calling into various little shops - bought some broad beans - came home, flumped. 

Modern travel... changes. Flying to Malta

I remember “London Airport” (Heathrow) in the 1950s because my dad worked for BOAC, and occasionally we went there. It wasn’t huge. It seemed like what we used to call ‘an airfield’, something still relatable to the ancient land-use, to be measured in fields.  In fact the buildings and fencing are all still there, a remnant of planning and development from the mid-20th century, or even pre-war. The floor of the public reception area had some sort of wind-rose design in it, I think. 

Look at the airports now! Several of them round London, occupying vast spaces which were (within my memory) good farmland, covered now with rolling acres of scabby concrete, and the buildings go on and on and on. These buildings give me a kind of dread, as they are all about crowd control - with thick plateglass walls which allow you to see filades of other people trooping along in another direction from your own, or herded into patient groups. There are signs and ramps and escalators and lifts and corridors which stretch into the vanishing point.  To me, it all seems to be a preliminary for some kind of fascist operation. They could horde hundreds of thousands of us into these spaces, if they needed to imprison us. It’s ready waiting, the airport landscape, with fencing, drains, pens, spaces, even catering… and all conveniently placed sufficiently remotely from the centre of the city.  Now this idea is in my head, I can't expunge it.  Sorry.  

The process of flying has become one of enumeration - we are no longer people, individuals, but digits in the computer age. We are scanned, photographed, tagged, bundled up and dispatched along various routeways.    Yesterday, despite the anxieties and doubts generated by coronavirus (Should we be flying? Will I catch this plague on my journey? Will we get back?) it all went smoothly enough. We parked, we survived the astonishingly bitter cold wet wind attacking the carpark while we waited for the shuttle-bus to the terminus, we checked into our hotel, we woke up in time, we went through the screening and checked in, and we found an indifferent breakfast … all without a hitch. Strangely, we had to do that thing of taking out all liquids and putting them into tiny plastic bags beside our luggage to go through the scanning machines…  When we flew to Ireland just a month ago, that requirement was not in place. The make-up and toothpaste could stay inside the luggage.   Maybe the North and South Terminals at Gatwick have different procedures. Such ponderings are little diversions from the ghastliness of it all.

The flight was perfect. The announcements on board have changed slightly - you are not to move seats without permission as it might disturb the balance of the aircraft. We flew at 39,000 feet - I think that’s over 7 miles up!   Makes having a poo on the flight somehow even more miraculous. Seven miles!   It was almost as cold on arrival at Valletta as it had been leaving Gatwick… cloudy, stormy.  We queued to be allowed in (still in the Schengen EU line), we picked up the key for the hire car. That was a shortish stroll from the terminus, but not in the allocated bay. It turned out to be herded in by a great swathe of other hire cars, about 4 rows back. 

 

The hard-working car-hire lad had to move all these out of the way before we could get ours out, and he was preoccupied because somehow he had lost his mobile phone (work link), and someone had driven off with it…. He was agitated. But we agreed all the (many) bumps and dints in the edges of our Ford Ka, and set off.    

Here is Malta - the road from the airport past Valletta is like like some sort of urban nightmare - a winding tract of car showrooms, builders' yards, tumble-down masonry, greasy engineering plants, anonymous commercial buildings, minute survivors of ancient farmsteads with a few rows of potatoes or gnarled vines, beautiful chunky square-edged balustraded balconies, lovely bits of 18th and even 19th century buildings, views down past the sprawling city to the sea, and eventually some sense of the countryside.  We diverted into Rabat (whose meaning, in Arabic, is ‘suburb’), one of the many many hilltop settlements with spectacular churchy buildings at the very top, and fortifications guarding higgledy-piggledy lanes and alleys…. There we had lunch in a courtyard (Piazza della Chiesa Parrocchial) beside the museum celebrating the short stay on the island of St Paul, on his way to Rome and martyrdom.  Our lunch was absolutely perfect - a salad of pears and Italian cheese, and then seafood.  I managed a quick sketch.... 

   

Then on we went, towards the north, with some agriculture now more prevalent, across a lovely flat little valley full of horticultural farms, and up into Mellihia and our apartment. 

This is 4 years old, with a lift to our 3rd floor eyrie. We have 2, or even 3, flat roof terraces, with distant sea views, and a quiet stony urban outlook.  There is nothing green in sight anywhere (apart from really distant hilltops far away).

 We walked down into the old town…. narrow pavements, tat shops, nail bars, cafes, two grocery shops packed with everything including lots of fresh broad beans and other summery vegetables, and brands of (ie) jam which are no longer found in Britain (Foster Clark).  We were amused by the local car numberplates.  

    

We went into the two churches which are (according to a guide book) built ‘atop one another’ (eh?).    One is very old, built into a cave in the cliff and all squint… with an icon or mural of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. This is reputed to have been painted by St Luke himself in AD60.  I seriously doubt it.  The church is smallish, packed with votive junk and decorations and is really wonderful.  A nun is on watch.  

 

Outside, and on top of the cliff is an airy spacious baroque ‘parish church’ (cathedral sized), with a lovely white stone interior and red stone outside. The statuary adorning the inside of the dome is risible. 

Airports

Airlines have to treat you as a special individual when they’re encouraging you to book your seats. 

But the minute you get to the airport you are one of 30 million others. You are no longer a potential customer, but just a small parcel in the constant flow of objects through these depressing and hard-working buildings. 

So how they treat you is quite different.

In fact the technology has moved on huge amount. 

You no longer have to pull things out of your suitcase to go through the security scanners. Something about what I was wearing made the X-ray archway beep so they searched me. The woman said 'What have you got in your back pocket?' I produced a small piece of tissue paper that I had with me. 

The scanner could detect a piece of tissue paper - right through my body.

Then in the loo I was glad to see that the sanitary-towel disposal system has been improved. It’s now a small black tower with a dome top. It stands in the corner behind the pan, right out of the way. To open it you wave your hand over the top of the dome, which slowly rises, leaving an aperture for you to deposit whatever it is you want to leave there.  You don’t have to touch anything to open it.

However the hand-washing facilities leave something to be desired. The water comes dosed with soap, and the dryers (one per basin) don’t work. So you walk away from the loo with sticky fingers, still wet.