Why Maltese culture was carried by things nobody wrote down

What Malta asked UNESCO to protect

Three Maltese practices sit on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Il-Ftira, the culinary art and culture of flattened sourdough bread, was inscribed in 2020. L-Għana, a folksong tradition, was added in 2021. The Maltese village festa was inscribed in 2023.

None of the three has a text. Ftira is shaped by hand because the dough will not take a machine, and the UNESCO file records that apprentices learn in the bakery by watching and doing. Għana in its most popular form is a duel improvised on the spot between one or two pairs of singers who compete on rhyme, argument and repartee. The festa is prepared across a whole year by volunteers and transmitted by taking part, with children learning the songs and the stories of the village and its sacred figures by attending.

That is a peculiar set of things for a country to nominate, and it is an accurate one. For most of the period in which the modern culture of the islands formed, the language people actually spoke had no standing in a court, a school, a printing house or a church. Written business was conducted in Sicilian, then in Tuscan Italian, and from the nineteenth century onwards in English. What was made in Maltese therefore had to survive on its own terms, in a bakery, on a bandstand and behind a statue in the street.

How the kitchen language became a national language

Maltese descends from Siculo-Arabic, the variety that developed in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091, and it reached the islands with settlers from Sicily early in the eleventh century. The Norman conquest of 1091 and the expulsion of the Muslims, complete by 1249, cut the vernacular off from its Arabic source and left it to develop alongside Italian instead. It is the only Semitic language officially written in the Latin script, and the only Semitic and Afroasiatic official language of the European Union.

The isolation is legible in the vocabulary. About 52% of modern Maltese vocabulary is Italian or Sicilian in origin, 32% Arabic or Siculo-Arabic, 10% French and 6% English, but the function words, the small machinery of the language, are mostly Arabic, so the Semitic third is the part in constant use. A study published in 2016 found that Maltese speakers understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian or Libyan Arabic, while speakers of those varieties understand about 40% of Maltese.

For centuries the language was described, in a phrase its own scholars still quote, as the language of the kitchen and the workshop, while Italian carried literature, law and commerce. The earliest written reference to it is in a will of 1436, which calls it lingua maltensi. The oldest surviving text is Il-Kantilena, a poem by Pietru Caxaro from the fifteenth century. Printed Maltese arrived slowly after that: the first newspaper in the language in 1839, the first epic poem in 1842, the first history of the islands written in Maltese in 1862, the first novel in 1863.

The standard was assembled late and by committee. The modern orthography was introduced in 1924 in a guidebook printed by the government press for the Akkademja tal-Malti, expanded in 1984 and updated again in 1992. Maltese was recognised as an official language in 1934, replacing Italian and standing beside English. The Maltese Language Act of April 2005 created the National Council for the Maltese Language, whose duties include ruling on how words entering from other tongues are to be written.

The council describes the resulting arrangement without embarrassment: Maltese gives its speakers a sense of tradition and continuity, and English lets them deal with everyone else. Ethnologue counts 530,000 speakers, 450,000 of them in Malta and 79,000 abroad, and the diaspora numbers point one way. Australia held 36,000 Maltese speakers in 2006, down from 45,000 in 1996.

Why the parish decides what happens

There are 359 churches across Malta, Gozo and Comino, roughly one for every thousand residents, and the parish church is the architectural and geographic centre of every town and village. Civic pride attaches to the parish rather than to the locality, and the festa is where it is settled annually. Malta: politics sets out the councils that sit alongside the parishes.

More than sixty parish feasts are held on Malta in a year, mostly in the summer, with nearly twenty more on Gozo. The season runs from the end of April to the beginning of October, each lasts about a week, and it closes on the Sunday evening when the statue of the patron saint is carried through the streets behind the clergy and the bands.

The anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain, quoted in work published by the University of Malta, described the festa as an occasion on which groups express their loyalty to their patron saint and unite to defend and enhance the reputation of their village. He also observed that at a festa one can smell both the incense and the gunpowder used in the fireworks, which is a fair account of the proportions.

The fireworks are inherited from the Knights, who set them off for the election of a Pope or a Grand Master and for ecclesiastical anniversaries. The oldest forms attached to a saint were volleys fired by the local bombardiers in honour of St Barbara, and the maskli, mortars let off at the start and the end of a procession. By the twentieth century Maltese firework factories were producing for the festa trade.

The practice is thinning at the edges without collapsing. The UNESCO file notes increased secularisation. Freedom House and the World Factbook report that 98% of the Maltese profess Roman Catholicism, while a survey commissioned by the Church of Malta found that, as of 2005, 52.6% of the population attended services regularly. Researchers who spent Holy Week of 2023 on the islands found the co-cathedral in Valletta about two thirds full for the Holy Thursday liturgy and the streets outside it full of young families.

Why two band clubs share one village

The wind band tradition is younger than the festa it serves. The first band is said to have been set up in the village of Żebbuġ in the late 1840s under a blind musician, Indrì Borg. Italian maestri who had fled the fighting on the mainland during the nineteenth century settled in Malta and helped establish and direct new bands, while British military bands parading through the towns supplied a second model. Almost every Maltese town and village now supports between one and three band clubs.

A band club is a formal institution: a constituted association with an elected committee, premises of its own and dues-paying members drawn from every occupation and social class, where members meet in the evening to argue about the festa, catch up on village news and discuss national politics. Clubs teach music free every week to young people who want to play, and the trained players give their services back without payment, which is what keeps the cost of a festa within reach.

Where a village has two clubs, they compete. Boissevain listed the fronts: the decoration of the streets, the adornment of the statue, the number of guest bands invited, the quantity and quality of the fireworks, and the exact number and size of the candles on the altars and the count of light bulbs on the facade of the church. Rivalries have needed police intervention to stop physical confrontation, and church authorities have threatened to cancel the outdoor events and have sometimes done it.

The competition has produced a real repertoire. Band marches are written by the hundred every year, commissioned and donated by supporters or given by the composers themselves, and a new set is recorded and sold in the days before festa week. A march played from a car stereo during the feast tells the street which club the driver belongs to. On the morning of the festa the band marches from around nine until two or three in the afternoon, stopping for refreshment supplied by supporting households while people on the balconies pour water over the supporters below.

Precedence is one of the few things written down. In Naxxar the Peace Band, the older of the town's two clubs, holds first place in the Good Friday procession as a contractual right, and the Victory Band processes behind it.

How Holy Week and carnival divide the year

Holy Week begins early on the islands. The Friday before Palm Sunday carries the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, which elsewhere in the Western church falls in September, and in 2023 at least 21 parishes on Malta and Gozo brought her image into the streets. In Valletta it was carried the length of the peninsula and back, with the archbishop and hundreds following and the crowd generally silent.

Holy Thursday belongs to the seven churches. After the liturgy many people spend the evening visiting seven altars of repose, known on the islands as sepulchres. Because most villages have a single church, some parishes set up seven stations inside it; in Mdina and Rabat, which have many churches close together, the streets stay crowded past ten at night and vendors sell ring-shaped apostles' bread.

Good Friday is a public holiday and the day the statues come out. In Naxxar a wooden clapper is spun in the bell tower in place of the bells, men who often inherit the right from their fathers carry the platforms, and the procession takes an hour and a half simply to leave the church. The interior is draped in black silk damask, a custom that was supposed to end after the Second Vatican Council: when the parish priest announced its suppression, parishioners stayed in the church overnight and installed the decoration anyway, and the diocese relented.

Easter reverses the tone. White flags with red crosses go up across the islands, and in Birgu the parish of St Lawrence runs a statue of the risen Christ through the streets on the shoulders of young men, stopping first at the village band club and then at the chapels. Households move from apostles' bread to figolla, an iced sweet cut into hearts, lambs and eggs.

Carnival sits at the other end of the calendar as the licensed opposite. Archives show a carnival on the islands from at least the fifteenth century, when the Mdina Università regulated the price of meat during the season. The Knights formalised it: a jousting tournament at Birgu in 1535, a proclamation read from the palace balcony to open the festivities, and il-parata, a dance in which participants dressed as knights and Ottomans fought a mock battle in honour of the victory of 1565. Il-parata still opens carnival, performed mostly by children.

The kukkanja came with it, a Neapolitan game in which competitors climbed a greased pole to seize hams, sausages and live animals tied at the top, brought to Malta by Grand Master Marc'Antonio Zondadari in 1721. In 1763 an impatient crowd rushed it before the signal; the soldiers guarding it killed 17 people on the spot and another 37 died later of their injuries. A related seaside game, il-gostra, is played on a greased pole leaned out over the water with three flags at its end, and its origins are dated to the Middle Ages.

Carnival floats turned satirical in the 1920s and 1930s, aiming at political figures and unpopular government decisions, and a law passed in 1936 banned political satire from carnival. That ban was lifted in 2013. The main celebration is in Valletta, and the best known village version is at Nadur on Gozo.

Why the best painting was made by visitors

The Knights furnished their island with imported talent. Italian and Flemish Mannerists came to decorate the palaces and churches, among them Matteo Perez d'Aleccio and Filippo Paladini, who was active on the islands from 1590 to 1595. Caravaggio painted at least seven works during a stay of fifteen months, and two of them, The Beheading of St John the Baptist and St Jerome, remain in the Oratory of St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Mattia Preti spent the last forty years of his life in Malta and turned the severe Mannerist interior of that co-cathedral into a Baroque one with his vault paintings.

Maltese painters followed the visitors rather than preceding them. Giulio Cassarino, who lived from 1582 to 1637, and Stefano Erardi, from 1630 to 1716, worked in Caravaggio's wake, and the sculptor Melchiorre Gafà, who lived from 1639 to 1667, became one of the leading Baroque sculptors of the Roman school. Parliament founded a National School of Art in the 1920s, the Modern Art Group formed during the post-war reconstruction, and MUŻA, the national community art museum, opened in late 2018 in the Auberge d'Italie, the sixteenth-century residence built for the Italian knights.

What the islands made without signatures was smaller and more durable. Bizzilla, Maltese bobbin lace of the filet-guipure variety, is worked on a straw-stuffed pillow and frequently carries the eight-pointed cross of the Order. It has been made here since the sixteenth century, was remodelled around the middle of the nineteenth by Lady Hamilton Chichester and Lady Sarah Austin, and remains a cottage industry across Malta and Gozo. Filigree work in gold and silver flourished under the Knights and still fills the jewellery shops.

Boatbuilding is the other craft with rules of its own. Five traditional types have survived, all sharing high stemposts fixed at right angles to a straight keel, carvel construction with no deck, and heavy painted decoration. The xprunara was the prototype, the passenger dgħajsa appeared early in the seventeenth century, and the luzzu developed from the Italian gozzo into the main fishing boat in the first decades of the twentieth. The eye painted at the bow is old: it appears on a Maghreb-Siculo ceramic bowl of the twelfth century.

What the temple builders left behind

The megalithic temples were built in three distinct periods between roughly 3600 BC and 2500 BC, and they rank among the earliest free-standing stone buildings in the world; they were claimed as the oldest anywhere until Göbekli Tepe was found in Turkey. The Ġgantija phase, from 3600 to 3000 BC, culminated in the Tarxien complex, which stayed in use until 2500 BC. After that date the temple-building culture disappeared, and Bronze Age arrivals who cremated their dead and built dolmens replaced it.

The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is the other half of the prehistoric record. It was cut from coralline limestone around 2500 BC using cyclopean rigging to lift the blocks, covers about 500 square metres, was in use between 4000 BC and 1500 BC, and was probably a sanctuary before it became a necropolis. Heritage Malta dates its inscription to 1981.

The listing grew in stages. Ġgantija on Gozo was inscribed in 1980, and in 1992 the committee extended the property to five further sites and renamed it: Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra at Qrendi, Ta' Ħaġrat at Mġarr, Skorba at Żebbiegħ, and Tarxien.

Valletta is the third property and the opposite kind of object. The city was founded in 1566, immediately after the siege of the previous year, and planned as a single late-Renaissance creation on a uniform grid inside bastioned walls. Its 320 monuments stand within 55 hectares. Malta: history works through the siege and the order that built it.

The distance between the two ends of that list is the honest shape of Maltese heritage. The temples were left by a culture that vanished and was replaced, and the city was laid out by a foreign religious order for its own use. The continuous material is the smaller stuff in between.

What the islands eat and play

Maltese cooking carries strong Sicilian and Italian influence with English, Spanish, Maghrebin and Provençal layers over it. The Sicilian contribution is the base: olive oil, pasta, seafood and vegetables, with kapunata, arancini and baked rice among the dishes and cassata and kannoli among the sweets. Ftira takes its name from the Arabic fatir, unleavened bread, is baked hotter and flatter than other Maltese loaves, and is split and filled with olive oil, tomato, tuna, capers and olives.

The dish that carries the most identity is the fenkata, a meal of stewed or fried rabbit, treated in the record as important historically to the development of a national identity. The wine industry works with the native Girgentina and Ġellewża grapes and has won protected designation for wines grown on Malta and Gozo. The British left turkey and plum pudding at Christmas in place of the older rooster and cassata, along with the annual pantomime at the Manoel Theatre, which has been working since 1732.

Food, song and sport meet at Imnarja. The feast of St Peter and St Paul falls on the weekend before 29 June at Buskett Gardens near Rabat, is the country's principal folk festival, and runs on għana singing contests and fried-rabbit picnics. Bareback horse races on Saqqajja Hill in Rabat on 29 June go back to the fifteenth century, and the Knights took them seriously enough that a Grand Master's proclamation threatened anyone obstructing a racing horse with forced labour on the galleys.

Football is the most popular sport and its loyalties are borrowed: supporters follow the English and Italian matches, and a World Cup divides the islands between those two national teams. Waterpolo carries the summer, and enthusiasm for it produced an Amateur Swimming Association in 1925 and Malta's first Olympic appearance at Amsterdam in 1928. Boċċi is played three a side on coarse sand and travelled with the emigrants to Australia, Canada and the United States. The regatta rowed in the Grand Harbour on Freedom Day is contested for the Regatta Shield in boats built for speed at the cost of most of the traditional characteristics their builders could spare.