Two Days in Malta

We’ve finally made it to Malta, a Mediterranean island republic (actually three inhabited islands) 50 miles south of Sicily and 190 miles from Africa. It’s the 10th smallest country in the world (and one of the most densely populated), but in terms of its history, its central location in the Mediterranean Sea has put it at a bayonet’s point of much military history since the the Punic Wars. Two heroic defenses stand out, but I’ll get to these later.

The night before our arrival at the Port of Valletta, Malta’s capital, we enjoyed our first meal in “The Chef’s Table”, one of the two by-reservation restaurants on board. It has a fixed menu, this time five courses of Asian fusion cuisine. We were quite pleased with it. We have one more reservation here before the end of the cruise. Overall, we’ve been pleased with the food on the Vesta, even a bit more than we enjoyed on the Yi Dun along the China coast. Ask me again in a week. We’ll see if the fruit stays fresh.

Malta is an oddity in its culture and language. The original root of the people is Phoenician-Carthagenian. With the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Malta was part of the Roman Empire (including the Byzantine Empire) until the islands fell to the Arabs in 870 A.D. Most Christians are aware that St. Paul was shipwrecked on the island on his way to Rome and, thanks to miracles attributed to him, a great number of the islanders became and remained Christians through the present. The island has 365 Catholic Churches or, as both our guides declared, a church for every day of the year. The Arabs controlled Malta for 220 years, before being defeated by the Normans. Yes, the same Normans that conquered Britain. The Norsemen got around. 

Malta became a tradable pawn in European politics until awarded to the Knights of St. John/Knights Hospitaller/Knights of Malta. (There is a much longer formal name). Once an order of medical doctors established to assist pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, the order was forced to militarize when access to Jerusalem was closed by the Muslims. The order relocated from the Holy Land to Rhodes after Acre fell. In 1527, Suleiman the Magnificant, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, assaulted the 7,000 knights on Rhodes with a force of over 100,000. It took six months to subdue the knights. Due to their heroic defense, Suleiman allowed them 12 days to abandon Rhodes. Big mistake. The order eventually relocated to Malta, where they fortified that island. In 1565, the Ottomans laid siege to Malta with 120 ships and 40,000 to 50,000 troops. The six or seven hundred knights, augmented by 7,000 or so other defenders including Maltese militia, held out long enough for the siege to be called off. The significance of this is that the Mediterranean did not become a singularly Ottoman-controlled sea, which undoubtedly would have changed the history of much of Europe.

What is curious to me is that while the Arabs controlled Malta for but 220 years, the language of Malta changed completely to an Arabic-based Semitic one (one of only three: Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese). Yet the island remained predominantly Catholic. This is just the opposite of, for instance, Albania, where the language remained Slavic while the religion became Muslim. Enough random thoughts. Back to our tours. 

Our stay in Malta was two days. I do wish more of the stops on cruises were multiple days. Two days is hardly an in-depth visit but it’s an improvement on the one-tour-and-done scenario typical of most land and sea tours. We signed up for one tour each day. There were a dozen tours offered by Viking. There was even a tour that featured a visit to 7,000 year old Neolithic/Megalithic excavations, including temples older than Stonehenge. I wish we could have participated in several more than we did, but we were happy with those we selected.

Day one was a tour featuring “Malta at War”.  It’s time to let my photos tell the story.

On our way to the old capital of Mdina we stopped at the beautiful (inside) Mosta Basilica. It has two claims to fame. Its dome has the widest diameter of any Catholic Church. Second, it is the site of a “miracle”. During WWII, a German bomb penetrated the dome during a church service, but failed to explode. No one was injured. (Several others bounced off the dome before exploding elsewhere.) 

Top: A 3/4 panorama of the interior. Bottom left: The dome. Bottom right: The floor.

Left: A picture of the puncture in the dome from the bomb. Right: Does this vehicle get celestial protection?

WWII tunnels and caves for air raid shelter under and near the basilica. Each resident was allocated two square feet of space. Large families could bring in a bed.

Monuments on the route to Valletta. The palm in the middle picture shows bomb damage from WWII, as did many of the other older palm trees.

The land side walls of Valletta.

The Lascaris War Rooms. If Malta had fallen to the Italians or Germans, the Mediterranean would have become a Nazi sea. From June 1940 to November 1942, the Axis powers attempted to bomb or starve Malta into submission, launching over 3,000 air raids. They came close to succeeding. Over 10,000 buildings were destroyed, mostly homes, and thousands were killed. The British, later joined by the Americans, kept a headquarters deep under the city of Valletta known as the Lascaris War Rooms. The services finally learned to work together. We were given a demonstration as to how, using radar and spotters, incoming raids were tracked and responded to.

The war rooms were used as the HQ (under Eisenhower) during Operation Husky, the allies’ invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Views from Fort St. Elmo (on the harbor side of Valletta) overlooking the harbor, the second largest in the Mediterranean. 

Scenes in Valletta

Left: A Maltese gondola. Note two men manning the same set of oars. Right: A bell damaged during WWII.

That evening, we watched a dance troupe from the Malta’s second largest island, Gozo. They finished in time to catch the last ferry (10:00 p.m.) back to Gozo. They were fun to watch but aren’t likely bound for Broadway.

Left: The evening show. Right: A major industry for Malta is rehabbing cruise ships. Tourism and gaming, though, are much bigger industries.

Our tour on our second day was to visit Malta’s two capitals: it’s old one, Mdina, and the new one, Valletta. It was relatively early Sunday morning, so the streets were quiet in Mdina except for the constant ringing of church bells. (Mdina is not a misprint. Its name is derived from the same Arabic origin as is Medina, meaning fortress city.)

Mdina and the nobleman’s entry gate.

Sights and close-up detail in Mdina. If you can spot the snake, you’ve identified St. Paul. Mdina is supposedly the “silent city” with no automobiles, but we encountered quite a few owned by local residents along the single Main Street.

Because of Sunday services we could not enter St. Paul’s Co-Cathedral (“co” with St. John’s in Valletta). One of its bells was really deep in tone.

I discretely (I hope) slipped into this church during a service.

Left: View from the Mdina wall. Right: The box on the home’s wall allows the occupants to look out unobserved. The small slit on the side is to view whoever is knocking on the entry door.

More sights in Mdina.

There remains a medieval section of the town (versus the dominant Baroque era construction). It’s at a lower level. The earlier Arab, Roman and Phoenician levels are layers buried below this.

Large, heavy knockers were a status symbol. Now, now, no pun intended.

I’ve lost track of the churches and buildings we passed.

Monuments as we again enter Valletta.

Left: The Main Street through Valletta. Right: The Maltese Parliament Building.

Sights in Valletta

Left: The president’s palace. Malta is a parliament republic, with the prime minister as the chief minister. The president is a nominal position. While Malta is in the EU, it is not in NATO. Like Ireland and Austria, Malta has non-alignment built into its constitution. The socialist PM Dom Mintoff expelled NATO in 1971.

Views from Valletta. A cannon fires every day at noon, except Sunday. The battery of cannons is to welcome friendly ships. A friendly ship would fire seven times. The city would respond with twenty-one.

In Valletta

St. John’s Co-Cathedral. We slipped in for a moment.

Left: We passed and briefly entered a Scottish rite church. The contrast with Malta’s Catholic Churches could not be more stark. Right: Buses were once color-coded by route so illiterate riders knew which bus to take.