Day 3 in Malta: Minor misadventures in Mdina and Mosta

We had rented our car for two days, and on the second day of our driving around the island, we returned to Mdina. The city of Mdina was the capital of Malta from its founding by the Phoenicians around the eight century BCE until the Middle Ages. Its name was originally Maleth – also the name applied to the whole island. Mdina is famous for its massive walls, which accentuate the city’s stark elevation above the countryside and protect its dramatic spires. It has a cathedral dedicated to Saint Paul, who was shipwrecked on Malta and was supposed to have met the Roman governor Publius on the site of the future cathedral.

My breakfast in Mdina was the first traditional Maltese food I ate on the island, as the tourist restaurants in Valletta mostly offer variations of Italian and generic Mediterranean cuisine. I had a ftira, a round bread usually filled with cheese, tomatoes, and various typically Mediterranean ingredients. I continued this streak throughout the rest of the day, snacking on an imqaret (a rather greasy pastry stuffed with date paste) and a bigilla (a bean spread) later in the day. I also tried Kinnie, a Maltese soda that is far too bitter but also, somehow, as sweet as sodas from other countries. I do not understand the point of making such a drink.

Once we had experienced our fair share of the walled city, we walked to Saint Paul’s Catacombs in the south, making a quick stop inside the Basilica of Saint Paul. The catacombs constitute a large site spread out on either side of Saint Agatha Street. They do not form a single interconnected complex, but while excavating new tombs, gravediggers did occasionally break through the walls of neighbouring ones. Each catacomb has its own entrance that can be opened or closed to the public based on renovation needs. According to archaeologists, most of these tombs date to the third to the eighth century CE, with some burials happening after the re-Christianisation of Malta following two hundred years of Muslim rule.

Interestingly, the people buried in the catacombs were not all of the same religion. The signboards outside each entrance showed whether the people buried inside were pagans, Christians (denoted by a Chi-Rho), or Jews (denoted by a menorah). While walking around one of the Jewish catacombs, Joel noticed a swastika some vandal had etched opposite one of the Jewish graves and reported it to the front office.

Spurred on by a self-destructive completionist drive, we tried to visit every single open catacomb, but we gave up perhaps three or four catacombs before reaching our goal out of sheer tiredness and apathy. We sat down on a bench and tried to convince ourselves that the nearby Catacombs of Saint Agatha would be the same and could be skipped, but much to our annoyance, the pictures convinced us otherwise. Buying some sodas for energy, we dragged ourselves over to the Church of Saint Agatha. We found that tours took place every twenty minutes, and while waiting for the next slot, we visited the museum above the front desk.

The museum was truly bizarre. It was a collection of just about everything from gems to paintings and stuffed animals. One small figurine claimed provenance from six thousand years ago in Harappa, but part of it was literally crumbling into dust, and we figured that if it were really that old, it would not have waited to be put in a glass display to fall apart. The mummified crocodile from Kom Ombo, however, looked a little more convincing. After twenty minutes, the custodian got on the intercom and asked all visitors to come to the front desk, from which he led a tour into the catacombs. They were completely different from those of Saint Paul: unlike their austere and infrequent decorations, these had a whole chapel with saints painted in vibrant colours and several other rooms decorated with bright patterns.

After filling ourselves with some snacks and pastries, we quickly made our way to a lookout point over the city of Mdina and then continued to Mosta, where we had not managed to find a parking lot the day before. This time, we were successful, and we could finally view Mosta’s famous dome from the inside. This nineteenth-century dome – more properly referred to as the Sanctuary Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady – is reportedly the third-largest unsupported dome in the world. One interesting titbit about the building is that it was almost destroyed by German bombing during World War Two, but when a bomb broke through the ceiling in 1942, it failed to detonate. A plaque that portrays this event as the miraculous result of divine intervention is displayed next to the shell of this bomb at the dome’s museum.

We returned the car just before sundown and called a taxi. Brent had made a dinner reservation for Joel’s birthday, but we still had two hours to kill, so we headed to the Tigné Seafront. From Tigné, we watched as the sky went dark over the bright dome of Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, after which we took the ferry over to the main island and ate our dinner. Because it was fancy but not very filling, we quickly found ourselves at the Christmas Market buying local food and drinks, which in Brent’s and my case involved an Imbuljuta tal-Qastan – a spiced hot chocolate drink with chestnuts and (unfortunately) citrusy flavouring.