On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Deputinize America
Part of the joy of staying on a small island with a limited population is the ease of day trips. Using our hotel in Valletta as a base, we visited historical sites both around the harbor and in the interior; along other costs and in growing fields.
Keep in mind that the population of Malta and its affiliated islands is only 500,000, and each little neighborhood and hamlet has its own culture.
This was an older town on the Grand Harbour, Birgu. Note how narrow the streets were – decidedly medieval. It had a much older history than that, though, and dated to Phoenician times.
A delightful fishing town up the coast.
Nighttime parades were for all ages.
Building ornamentation was…..interesting…
Neolithic structures on Malta date back 5000-7000 years. This is the ruin at the Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex – things like this are everywhere on Malta, full of loops, situated as observatories so that certain calendar dates are celestially marked. My lay theory is that they marked growing seasons and were genuinely a fertility cult (hence the appearance that resembles fallopian tubes). The original builders culture disappeared for several hundred years, possibly due to resource depletion.
Archaeology suggests that these original builders were not warlike people because evidence of conflict don’t seem to exist at those layers. Late neolithic people found their way back to this area late in the third millennium BCE, and eventually, the Phoenicians found it and started trading there.
I have another lay theory about observatory structures like this and Stonehenge – people originally created wood circles with animal hides and wood as panels, and made their observations through the open spaces. Eventually, the neolithic folks got the idea to make their structures permanent so they didn’t have to go through the painstaking process of maintaining the circles made of organic substances.
NOTE: We were not permitted any photograph within the stunning, very somber Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum
You like Caravaggio’s bloody work? There’s an original there (he murdeered his way across Europe, always finding eventual protection from the Church.
War for Ukraine Day 1,160: Danger in the Small Hours
eclare
Those prehistoric structures are interesting.
Trivia Man
I have friends who toyed with the idea of moving there full time back in the 90s. They said it was paradise. They had a very early internet shopping site so anyplace with an internet connection was their office.
Did you visit the Popeye set? Hoping to see updated pictures of that.
stinger
Fascinating. The prehistory, the more recent art, the current customs. Thanks!
J.
So interesting! Thanks for sharing.
Quicksand
That town in the first pic clearly dates back to the Stone Age.
WendyBinFL
The first photo in this array is the same as the first one in yesterday’s Malta I collection, identified as:
Valletta, Malta First morning at the city walls, awaiting the parade.
KSinMA
Thanks. What an interesting place!
Mr. Prosser
Your lay theory matches that of the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas who promulgated the theory of the cult of the Neolithic Mother Goddess in “Old Europe” before the Indo-European migrations. A peaceful matriarchal society that spread over much of Balkan area and could easily have been on Malta. The goddesses’s temples very much patterned after the female reproductive system.
Ruckus
I was in Malta a few decades ago and it was nice back then as well. I enjoyed my trips and looking at the place gave me a vision of what life may have been like for basically everyone. Of course that could be said for a lot of places in Europe that I saw. Even the places that is supposedly where some of my family history is from. There are a few areas where that could be true, most (all?) of my ancestors more than a generation or 2 at most are from European countries.