It's bitterly cold today so I need to get out and walk to warm up!
Yesterday I went on my second Council for the Arts and Culture tour, this time to Mdina, the old capital of Malta, also known as the silent city because you have to walk. The city has been written about since the Phoenicians who noted that it was also occupied by the Carthaginians but there was almost certainly a prehistory to the Mdina plateau and hilltop. It still is the home of several Maltese noble families. The photo is of St Paul's catacombs which were our first port of call.
The dead were kept apart from the living by putting burial sites outside the city gates. We were dropped off from the special English-speaking bus (this was the first time the Council laid on an English-speaking guide) outside the Mdina gates and we had to walk through a winding Rabat road to get to the Catacomb entrance. There is also a small catacomb beneath St Agatha's chapel further down the road and I made a note to visit there another time, perhaps when I get back from my trip to the feast of St Agatha in Catania.
The catacombs are a maze of interconnecting corridors between larger chambers and there are different kinds of burial plots, some on the floor but most on the sides or with vaults stretching away one after another into the distance as you can see in the photo. The walls were washed in red and green but most of the pigment has disappeared. When the Romans occupied the site, they kept the treasures and got rid of all the bones together with the DNA that might have yielded useful information today. So we can only wonder at the painstaking work of quarrying out the social and burial areas. The guide pointed out the ventilation shafts and we noticed the chimneys above ground when we came up.
There were three busloads of us on the tour, so you can imagine the juggling that had to go on to get us all through the confined spaces. We stuck together in our groups and our guides tried to get us in and out without colliding with another group but it meant a bit of waiting around in between visits. Our next visit was to the Mdina dungeons and as well as leading us back through the winding street to the Mdina gate, our guide briefed us on what to expect. She suggested that if there were any children with a sensitive disposition, the parents should leave them for her to entertain above ground whilst the parents went down. I wondered what horrors awaited me in the dungeons just inside the city gates.
In setting up the dungeons as a museum, the organisers gathered together all the nasty examples of torture, imprisonment and death in Malta and made life-size tableau in each of the cells to illustrate these horrors. There is ample blood, chopped off heads and limbs, plague infestations, hangings and gunned down mutineers and patriots. There is even a depiction of St Agatha with her torturer wielding the huge nutcrackers he is about to use to cut off her breast. It seems the pre-Christian Romans were the nastiest of rulers and cut off any bit they thought was relevant to the crime before finally crucifying or burning. But the Roman Inquisition, which was implemented in Malta rather than the Spanish version, was much more benign and only did a small amount of stretching, dropping from great heights whilst tied in nasty positions or strapping over a sharp, wooden horse with weights attached to the feet.
The Maltese people have valiantly managed a procession of colonisers until they finally gained their independence in the second half of the last century. On the rare occasion when they rebelled without arms as they did after Napoleon sacked and looted the churches, the ring leaders were put in front of a firing squad and their end is bloodily depicted in one of the cells.
After this relentless procession of horror, it was a relief to find two cells occupied by knights who eventually became Grand Masters! But by the time I got to them, I seemed to be alone in the dungeons so I hurriedly found my way out past the blood and gore and went into a palace next door to have my bread roll and orange juice that was included in the tour offering.
I sat on a doorstep in the sun by the Mdina gate until our guide started to round us up to go to our next adventure, the Domus Romana, just outside the gate. As we walked over, I chatted with an Australian couple from Brisbane with their young son. They had been traveling for a while through Egypt and Africa and were visiting relatives in Malta.
I had had the difference between a domus and a villa explained to me somewhere before. It seems that a villa is in the countryside whilst a domus is a townhouse. Since the old city in Roman times extended much more widely than the current walled city, Villa Romana, which is what it was called when I was in Malta as a girl, became Domus Romana. We had to wait outside the Domus until another group went through and I chatted with a Maltese woman who turned out to be a real estate agent about the rental market in Malta at present. It seems that 2009 will be a good year to buy!
The most significant aspect of the domus still visible are the mosaic floors. One has an interesting 3D effect and another has the bowl with twin doves as the centre piece. After my experiences in Libya, the remaining pieces of Roman statuary were unremarkable. How blase I have become! Archaeologists assume that there are more Roman remains under the Moorish burial site behind the domus, but they are reluctant to destroy the site to find out. Layers on layers!
We had another short wait outside the domus for our train ride which was the culmination of the tour. I decided to go in search of coffee and found a tiny, dark bar around the corner where cheesecakes had just come out of the oven. There was a queue and by the time I got my take-away coffee and cheesecake, the train had arrived and people were starting to get in. I had to gulp down my coffee and put the hot cheesecake in my pack as it was forbidden on board. The road train is a new offering and it takes a route around the Mdina hill through Mtarfa and back up to the city gate. It is interesting to do it once and it gave me the opportunity to chat with an Englishman who has a house in Zurrieq which his family visits from time to time. He encouraged me to put my name down for the Victoria Lines walk that Malta Ramblers are planning in a few months time. It is described as a rugged, all-day walk and I wasn't sure if I could manage it but it seems it is well worth it.
On the tour bus back to Valletta I made a mental list of some of the things I need to return to Mdina for. These include St Agatha's chapel and catacombs, a craft shop that I was introduced to at the lace-making exhibition, and another shop that apparently still sells Malta weave that I was beginning to think was no longer made in Malta.
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