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Contents |
Day 1 |
Day 2 |
Day 3 |
Day 4 |
Day 5 |
Day 6 |
Day 7 |
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Malta - Day Five Il Kastell |
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As though we had not walked enough yet that day, we now had to walk to the top of a large hill in order to get to the castle that dominates Victoria and the surrounding countryside. But, since we were in Gozo and near the spot, we continued our trudge up to the top of the final hill. I took a picture of my wife near the top of the stairs to the castle, and she did her best to smile. There is presently some disagreement on just how funny this picture is. We were both in a much better mood when we found the refreshment stand. Ah, bottled water. So worth whatever it was we paid for it. |
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Introducing Today’s FortressFollowing our stop for rehydration, we entered Il Kastell (also known as The Citadel), a fortress dating back to the time of the Knights of the Order of St. John. It was built at an interesting time in Gozo's history: the point when it was still being repopulated from an incident in the 1400s (before the Knights took over) when the entire population of Gozo was captured by the Saracens and hauled off into slavery. To prevent this happening again, the Knights built this rather large fortress high atop a hill that dominated the countryside, named it Il Kastell, and made a law decreeing that everyone in Gozo had to sleep inside its walls every night. This kept the population close to Victoria for a long time and generally impeded the growth of the towns in other areas of the island. But episodes of hauling entire islands off to slavery tend to be much more detrimental to the growth of towns, so I think most everyone was willing to live with the trade-off. Needless to say, we were less than pleased with the Knights for their decision to put their fortress on top of a hill while we were approaching it, but the end to the worst part of our walking and the refreshing return of water to our bodies brightened both of our moods considerably. The fortress of Il Kastell was not particularly large, but it was a formidable edifice that meant serious business. It was tightly packed, densely utilized space that, nonetheless, did make some concessions to man's needs beyond bread, water, and the prevention of the enslavement of the entire population of an island. And because it was a group of warrior-monks who built the place, this, of course, meant a church. Getting Churched OutThere are really only so many ways I can describe churches. Particularly because, by this point in my travelogue, I have described several churches along a similar design to this church and I'm afraid of repeating myself or just playing the same, old tune. The limits of grandiose hyperbole and the outer extent of flowing prose intended to evoke emotion had pretty well been reached by this point, so it is difficult to wax poetic without feeling like it's all been done. This is the state in which I find myself as I begin my tale of our visit to the Church of the Assumption. The first assumption is, of course, that I have the name of the church correct, because I really don’t remember what it was. |
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Though I mention that I am running out of nice things to say, I do not to say that the Church of the Assumption was not a beautiful church; it was certainly one of those. The chapels were stunning, the architecture was magnificent, the artistry of the interior was a delight, and the paintings and frescoes were quite wonderful. It's just that I'd seen many examples of the same sort of thing before, so the impact of the entire scene was not as great as it once was. Likewise, the fact that it was getting late made it a quicker trip through the interior than might otherwise have been our intent. However, we did manage to take a good tour of the interior and absorb many of the features of this new house of worship. |
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The floor, again, played as much the star as the ceiling, which I regard as strange the more I think about it. Some additional investigations into the Baroque have not made mention of tombs in the floor of churches, so this may be a largely Maltese thing. I call this strange because most all churches focus the eyes heavenward. However, these Maltese churches are also eager to remind churchgoers of what is below. Some Thoughts on Blah, Blah, Blah...Looking down implies both the grave and hell and these are, in many ways, two very dissimilar places for the warrior-monk. Yes, the grave implies mortality, but it is also the door to the heaven that they are seeking: you need to die before you can go to heaven. Thus, the importance of the reminder of mortality (memento mori); it is necessary to remember one's own mortality in order to live rightly in order to prepare oneself for the afterlife. However, looking down also means looking toward hell, the very place where the attendees of the church are not supposed to be going. |
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The graves may also be a kind of warning of what happens if you don't live an upright life. Or it may also be a morbid fascination, which I cannot deny having when I look at all those marble images of skeletons. Or I may be creating the duality entirely in my own mind. Or perhaps I am completely misunderstanding the situation altogether. I have the feeling that the willingness to look down has something to do with the fact that Maltese culture was so largely defined by the warrior classes of the Knights of the Order of St. John. Warriors do one of two things during tumultuous times: kill people or die. This means that their relationship with the grave is a rather close, if ambivalent, one. This would probably be particularly on the mind of the knights living in Malta, which sat on border between Muslim North Africa and Christian Europe. Of all the fruits in Christendom, Malta hung the lowest. There is also the issue of just conserving space on a pretty small island. By putting the graves inside the church, there is no need to fill otherwise valuable land outside the church with tombs and bodies. But it is not as though all the people who ever lived on Malta were buried in the church -- it would be expensive, time-consuming and difficult to bury someone inside a building like that. |
The ceiling of the church. Note the woman in the corner holding a human head. No, I don’t know why she’s doing that.
The altar and nave of the church. Note the number 7 sitting in the front of the church. That’s for the audio tour. |
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With all these thoughts in my head, I would need to make a pretty extensive investigation of Maltese history, floor tombs, the Baroque, and the Knights Hospitaller in order to come to my own conclusions on the matter. So I guess I won't be coming to any conclusions, because that sounds like more time than I have right now. A Couple of Points as We Approach the ExitBy the way, I would like to make a couple of points about this church, because it had a couple of noteworthy features. First, one of the chapels in this church had a fresco of the USS Ohio arriving into port in Valletta. Consider that this church has been around for a few hundred years and I think we can assume that this particular spot in the church already played host to some decoration of some manner -- probably of some significance, if only for its age. The church in Gozo saw fit to either remove it or paint over it in order to put up a fresco of an event that happened in the not-so-distant past. It seems that we should not underestimate the importance of the arrival of that particular ship at that particular time, as a church saw fit to commemorate the event. Second, there was the dome. Or, rather, the lack of a dome. It seems that they had intended to put a dome above the altar, but never quite got around to it. To cover that up, a painting of the interior of a dome was added above the altar. The thing is, everybody was so pleased with the painting, they never installed the dome. So that’s how things have stayed ever since. Third, there was the relic of St. Cecilia. Now I believe I mentioned earlier just how dicey the relic trade was back in the day. However, I think if you take a close look at the picture, you will agree with me that we can be pretty sure that they did a thorough job of making sure St. Cecilia is in there. |
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More than a little weird. But very thorough. |
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It was here that I also found out that wax sculptures freak out my wife. St. Cecilia and the wax replica of another saint (with a less significant contribution to the reliquary) were giving her some stress. Following our successful, if hurried completion of the audio tour of the local church, we took the opportunity provided by the waning day to tour the rest of Il Kastell. |
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