Dear Everyone,
Another week has gone by. It has been pretty windy here. The big parade on the last day of Carnival (Tuesday) was cancelled because of the wind; alas, so was my pickleball lesson/game. I hope I will be able to play this coming Tuesday, otherwise bringing a paddle and court shoes has been pretty unnecessary; I haven’t been able to connect to a game.
On Wednesday we took a crowded bus to the northwest end of the island, although the bus emptied out considerably after St Paul’s Bay (allegedly the site of St. Paul’s shipwreck) and then Mellieha, where we saw our first sand beach (the best beaches are on the southern bit of the west end. Apparently, this area is completed mobbed in the summer. It also has a salt pan (Mellieha means salt, even the Romans harvested salt here) centered nature reserve. We got off at the terminus, Cirkewwa, where we took a 30 minute ferry ride past Comino (the third largest island, mostly uninhabited) to Gozo, the second largest island, and it’s ferry port Mgarr.
Gozo is more agricultural and rural than Malta, but we saw little evidence of this on another 20-minute bus ride to the center of the island and the ‘capital’ city of Victoria. Once we were past Ghajnsielem, we saw lots of car dealerships. Although the British kept Victoria’s Mdina (called the Citadella) intact, you can see their hand in the widths of the streets of the rabat (they are wide). There are plenty of tourists walking about even in February, even though it’s only a percentage of what must be present in Valletta. Most are day trippers, or on guided tours, because the streets are much more empty after 6pm.
Cindy arranged for a two-night stay in a delightful hotel in
the center of Victoria called the Duke
Boutique Hotel. The hotel is on the
top two floors of a five-story small shopping center, with a Greens supermarket
in the basement. We had an off-season, mid-week price of about 100EU per night,
breakfast included. We would return,
especially now we get an additional discount as previous guests.
We went out for a walk in the medieval streets surrounding St. George’s
Basilica after eating some pastizzi.
The Basilica is very well maintained,
and fairly bright for a baroque church.
It also has a splendid mosaic chapel in the Byzantine style, created in
the early 2000s.
Later we walked a bit to a museum run by the church called Il-Hagr, which has a collection of archeologic and historical (mostly church related) artifacts. They were also running an art exhibition of a local artist named Clara Azzopardi.
Afterwards we had a delicious traditional Maltese dinner at Roza.
Octopus linguini
Thursday after breakfast we took a bus to Ggantija. This is a paleolithic site similar to the
ones we saw in in October (Hager Qim and Mnajdra). Like them, it is a UNESCO
protected heritage site. It has a very
nice associated museum, and beautifully curated botanic grounds on the way to
the archeologic site. Ggantija may be a
bit older than the sites in Malta, but they are all around 5500 years old. Ggantija is smaller, and not as well
preserved.
We had bought a multi museum ticket at Ggantija, and this
allowed us to go see the old wind powered grain mill in Xaghra.
This was much larger than the water pumping windmills we saw in the polders of
the Netherlands, and there were several rooms with a variety of old tools and
other artifacts of quotidian life. We
walked a bit in the adjoining village, Xaghra, and then took a
bus back to Victoria.
We had some pizza at Casa
Vostra, and then walked up the Citadella. People have been living here since Roman
times. The fortified city was sacked in 1551
by the Ottomans (There was a lot of
tit-for-tat fighting in the Mediterranean at the time, and Gozo was raided many
times in the fifty years beforehand).
The citizenry tried to make a deal with the Turks to save their skins,
but the Turks lied to get into the city and began killing and enslaving
everyone (maybe 6000 people). One of the Maltese ‘heroes’ of the time, Bernardo de Opuo, seeing
what was happening, ran home, killed his wife and children so they would not
fall into the hands of the Turks, and then ran out on a suicide mission of
attack. Even after the Ottomans finally
lost Malta to the Knights of St. John in 1561 Gozo continued to be raided until
1599. The island was slowly resettled by
Sicilians. By decree all of the women and children were required to sleep in
the Citadella each night until 1637. When
this law was lifted, the Citadella began to lose its political power.
Later that evening we went to a delicious dinner at another
Gozan hotspot, Maldonando.
Friday after breakfast we went home in reverse order,
bus-ferry-bus back to Swieqi.
Love, H
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