Themistocles Zammit and other obscure Maltese facts

So, we did enjoy our stay in Malta and here’s a few other reasons why:

Toilets – really, sniggering aside, they are important and they can sometimes determine whether a place is merely good or excellent. And I would have to say that Malta does public toilets well. Clean, working, paper, soap dispensers with soap, paper towels or even hand driers, and all well sign-posted. And in every town and village. What’s not to like? Compared to Italy …

Gardens – Malta does great gardens, planted on every roundabout, roadside verge not to mention the Upper and Lower Barrakka gardens.

Rubbish, or should that be lack of rubbish. Malta has a garbage collection and the people know what that means and how it works, unlike Italy, where the theory is there, but … There are even men with brooms and dust pans cleaning up in public places.

Quaint echoes of ye olde England. Grocers, bootmakers, provisioners, the list goes on and on, a relic of the days when this was obviously an important stop for the navy. Just travelling on the local bus and looking at some of these old shops and signs made us laugh.

This must be the smallest store ever, just a door width across.

Houses - Malta has very little timber, which was mostly cut down in prehistoric and Phoenician times. The building material of choice is stone. Houses, road edgings, cuttings, sheds, fences, bus shelters, all built of beautiful stone. Houses here feature vaulted ceilings with stone arches,  and arched windows, to give the structure some strength. It makes the houses in the ugliest villages quite appealing.

Even the famous hanging windows are sometimes inserted in arches. These balconies were the only timber we saw used in buildings.

Churches – big, gold, over the top, but like beautiful jewels – often featuring domes.

Finally, Sir Themistocles Zammit, or Temi to his friends. If you had to make up the name of an archaeologist from the Indiana Jones school of archaeology for a novel you were creating, you surely couldn’t think of anything more fanciful than Sir Themistocles Zammit. He was professor of chemistry, a medical doctor, an historian and  an archaeologist, who was responsible for some of the major prehistoric finds on Malta around the turn of the century - the prehistoric temples of Tarxien, Hagar Qim, the Hypogeum, Phoenician rock tombs, findings spanning Phoenicia to Roman times – yep, he was your man. BTW, he won his knighthood for working on the transmission of Brucellosis to humans.

Decorative work on a prehistoric inner temple doorway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now off to Spain.