Gozo

Thursday, March 8, 2018

I’ve not yet posted photos of two things for which Malta is well known, door knockers and balconies.  There are remarkable door knockers all over; here are two pair:

Many, if not almost all of the houses have a special kind of balcony on the floor above the ground floor (which here is called the first floor).  They are narrow, protrude only slightly out over the sidewalk, and are fully enclosed.  Often on a street each is painted a different bright color, and they are very attractive.  Here are some:

Here is a particularly fancy one:

The country of Malta is not a single island, but a small archipelago of three islands.  One of the islands is named Malta, and is by far the largest, and the one we’ve been on up to today.  The others are Comino, tiny and with a population of 3, and Gozo, smaller than Malta and far less crowded, with a population of 32,000.

We drove to the  harbor town of Ċirkewwa where we caught the ferry to Gozo:

We docked at the town of Mġarr. (The Maltese language is full of double consonants and consonant combinations which seem to need more vowels.  More study needed.)

The primary reason for our visit to Gozo is to see the temple complex at Ggantija.  (The double G at the beginning of a word is pronounced sort of guh-juh).  This is the oldest free-standing building in the world, dating to about 3600 BCE, and we are told there is nothing similar anywhere.  As the population was thought to be small, living in caves and or huts, the size and complexity of the temples may indicate that they were pilgrimage sites of some sort.  At least that’s one of the theories.

There were a couple of artifacts from the temples left here and not removed to the museum in Valletta .  Here’s a pottery shard with beautiful decoration which was incised after firing:

Here is a pair of seated “corpulent figures” (the words of the label):

Here are the walls of one of the chambers in the temple:

Here is another wall which is made of two different kinds of limestone:

Here is a structure thought probably to be an altar of some sort.  The char on the stone is made of carbonized animal remains, probably indicating animal sacrifice:

We had a delicious fish lunch at a seaside restaurant, and then visited the 17th c. Citadel on a prominent rise on the island.  We had a discussion about the difference between a citadel and a fortress (none that we could discover) and a fort (military only, no civilians).  The Citadel clearly was a place for living in a protected environment.  Inside the walls there’s a church:

Open areas and apparent living accommodations:

There was a Jewish Quarter.  A plaque on a wall read:

JEWSH QUARTER

There are indications that TRIQ IL-FOSOS, the street along the north side of the Cathedral was the Jewish Quarter in medieval times.  The Jews paid a special tax to the City Universita, but in return held a monopoly as apothecaries and dyers.

This is the street:

We then made slow progress back to the ferry, delayed by window shopping:

Tomorrow the cathedral in Valletta.