Malta, 4: Museum Of The Ggantija Temples Of Gozo

For Ggantija read Gigantic, that is, made by giants. That's what the locals made of these megaliths, 5 millennia later, just as the classical Greeks thought the Mycenean strongholds they found had been built by a race of giants. The temple complex at Ggantija is perhaps Malta's oldest, reckoned as dating from 3,500 BC, and therefore a good bit older than, say, Stonehenge. The dates on all these things keep changing. I always think of our experience at Skara Brae, where, at the outset of our ranger-led tour, she announced we could simply add a thousand years to all the dates on the signage: a new calibration was in effect. Anyhow, from Malta to Portugal to Brittany to Ireland and the UK and beyond, western Europe was seeing its great three millennia of megalith building. We've seen most of these structures. Those that are so far known. Malta's are among the most distinctive and interesting: oriented uniformly to the southeast, clover-leaf in design, with "apses," now generally thought to have been roofed-over in corballed fashion. Some say they were "temples" in a fertility rite...corpulent female votive offerings here and there. Who knows?

Anyhow, the Ggantija complex has a great museum preceding the self-guided tour, and here are some highlights.

Entrance to the complex; yes, another of Malta's World Heritage Sites

The megalithic world...in Malta

One of the more famous of the corpulent figures

Other votives...reminding me a little of Cycladean
figurines we've seen elsewhere in the Mediterranean

Probably not non-stick

A selection of the ladies found at Ggantija

Also found at Gantija

Extrapolation

Simple foods, simply prepared; strangely, very strangely,
seafood play virtually no role in their diet (like the Vikings
in Greenland?)

More implements

And ornamennts

The complex at Ggantija has suffered much destruction, even in the modern era;
much of what is known comes from a series of watercolors by the early 19th
century German artist Charles Frederick de Brocktorff

Orthostat from one of the entrances

Malta, 3: Gozo Archaeological Museum

Gozo's archaeological museum is located within the Cittadella. Much of it addresses the neolithic sites on the island but it addresses succeeding millennia as well.

Entrance to the museum; in a older palazzo in the Cittadella

Basic stuff

Neolithic implements

We're here basically for Malta's "temples," huge megalithic
structures roughly contemporaneous with Stonehenge,
Avebury, Carnac, and such, 4,000-6000 years old; no one
really knows whether they were "temples" in the parlance
of our times, or maybe something else we have lost the
capacity to understand...

Helpful model #459057; we'll see the remains of a six-apse temple when we
get to the Tarzxen site on the Big Island

Speculations concerning construction

We'll be visiting the Ggantija temple; next day

Later implements

Much later amphora (Greek, Punic, Roman...)

An ever-popular Anne Boleyn, in her guise as Aphrodite;
1st century AD copy of Greek original; wait, no...

Maybe I have seen too many museums

Creepy; you never know what's going to be inside an amphora

Ever more implements

Malta, 2: Gozo Cittadella

From my study of contemporary Italian, I knew that "cittadella" was the citadel, the ancient ramparts to which Gozoans retreated in times of attack, and where many, the elites, that is, actually lived. I am sure the Cittadella repelled or outlasted many attacks and sieges, but, most famously, in 1551, after having been repelled from Mdina, on the Big Island, the raiding Turks took the Gozo Cittadella and hauled off nearly the whole population, 5,000, to become slaves. Saracen pigs! The Cittadella is now mostly a museum and shopping centre for made-in-Gozo artifacts. Sic transit, Gloria. BTW, "Cittadella" alliterates with "Shitaree," as in "the whole shitaree," a term I learned from my years studying Montana literature. Just FYI.

There is, of course, a multi-media intro to the whole experience, which is
indeed informative; here is Calypso, welcoming us to Gozo...

Entrance to the Cittadella, rebuilt many times, going back, no doubt, to
Neolithic times

Elevator repair on Gozo could be a major business
opportunity; the one at our hotel was out too, for a time

Gozo Cathedral; if it ain't Baroque...

So this is pretty much what Gozo looks like: from one town, you look around
and see half a dozen other towns on high points, with tilled fields in between;
look in any direction, and this is what you''ll see; von Clausewitz did not
invent the "high ground" thesis

Friendly fire?

Looking over Victoria to the next high ground

The Cittadella in its later years served as a prison; prisoners carved their
thoughts into the soft creamy limestone

At Tarzsen we'll see another scratching thought to be the oldest depiction of
a neolithic sailing vessel

Maybe it wasn't their 50th anniversary, but we are in good company; OK, we
skipped the cathedral

Remains of Cittadella dwellings

Us, there

Birds abhor a vacuum

The limestone is very soft

Prison cell

Thought for the day; no, for a lifetime