Rarer in the wild these days. A Maltese rabbit that had better watch out. It's a tradition to eat it on the feast of L'Imnajra.

The public holiday known as ‘L’Imnajra’ that falls on 29 June, has to be one of Malta’s most obscure in origin and defies neat description. In the religious calendar, the day marks the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, but this Maltese celebration, which starts on the night of 28 June and carries on all the next day into evening, is probably less to do with religion and more about rural life, country past-times and folk music.

It’s a bit of a medley really. It’s also associated with one place only in Malta, as people flock to celebrate it in Buskett Gardens that lie between Rabat and Dingli. It’s a family affair with people taking picnics and tents to spend a night out under the small pines which make up Malta’s largest stretch of woodland, planted by the Knights as a hunting grounds.

The feast has roots dating back well before the time of the Knights in Malta. ‘L’Imnajra’ is the Maltese corruption of the Italian word ‘Luminara’ meaning festival of light. The feast’s celebrations were once marked by bonfires lit in Mdina and Rabat, so folklore has it.

What to Expect
The night is characterised by general merry-making and its sociable atmosphere, with people bringing along instruments and making music. Local folk and ethnic-inspired bands usually turn up to play and set the scene. Families have BBQs and picnics and kids romp around. Traditionally, people take rabbit (Fenek) stew to eat. It’s a Maltese national dish and there’s even a Maltese word for ‘going out to eat rabbit’ – Fenkata! Some families and groups of friends make a complete summer night of L’Imarja and camp out.

The following day sees more organised rural pursuits: there is an agricultural show, which gets larger each year (seems to be a trend in Malta recently) as well as traditional bare-back horse and donkey races on Saqqajja Hill below Mdina. So expect some traffic chaos and roads blocked around that area.

Visitor Value
If you want to see some real Malta, then this could be worth a visit. It’s not the sheer exuberance of a village feast, as it’s more a summer folklore and farming affair. But it does have a certain appeal and charm. You will need to bus it there (Bus 81 from Valletta seems the best bet). Take some food and drink, get stuck in, and go with the flow. This is an impromptu affair in some ways, where people make their own fun.

Photo: John Haslam

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Time for a quick glance around between numbers. Mellieha's bandsmen

Fancy a festa? If you do, then there are plenty to choose from, several each weekend across the Maltese Island throughout the summer from June – September. Some main ones are here below, but for the full diary, see, Malta & Gozo Parish Feasts 2010. Each festa has its own flavour, so ask around, for example, for the best for fireworks (perhaps Mqabba for sheer volume and Lija for aesthetics), or the most authentic, rowdy, village-like, religious and so on.

• Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Zejtun – Third Sunday of June
• Saint George, Qormi – Last Sunday of June
• Saint Peter and Saint Paul (Mnarja), Nadur, Gozo – 29th June
• Saint Joseph, Msida – Sunday following 16th July
• Saint Sebastian, Qormi – Third Sunday of July
• Saint Venera, Santa Venera – Last Sunday of July
• Saint Gaetan, Hamrun – Sunday following 7th August

I write this to the constant boom of fireworks both from my village and from a neighbouring one. Malta & Gozo’s summer festa season has begun big time. And there’s no getting away from festas, love them or hate them. People I speak to tend to fall into one of three categories in their attitude to festas:

1. Love them - relish the noise, colour, fireworks, excuse to meet friends, the mêlée, the fast food, nougat, bands, heat, sweaty faces, and the religious regalia everywhere…

2. Just see them (tourists’ view) – a quaint, weird, fun, in-your-face, tradition of Malta with amazing fireworks, so ‘must-see’ at least one good one while on holiday here.

3. Hate them – and all that goes with them such as traffic and parking chaos, roads blocked, noise (above the senseless noise of petards), and the fact that in some parishes, the religious origins are superseded by excess and rowdiness.

Island visitors seem the most middle ground in their views. Well, they aren’t subjected to non-stop festas for three or more months. Locals don’t tend to be middle ground about festas – it’s an all or nothing affair with us mostly.

What are Festas or Parish Feasts anyway?
They celebrate the day of the parish patron saint. But tend to last around a week to 10-days and involve weeks of build up and work. For a flavour of what festa is, see our article Saints and Street Parties.

Verdict: They are colourful – fireworks and the characters you see milling around at them. So for that alone, find a festa this summer, at least one, and enjoy it for what it is. A good time had by all in the community, with a statue of a saint involved somewhere!

Photo: Leslie Vella

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Malta as it once was: agricultural life writ large

Siggiewi’s now annual agricultural fare kicks off on tonight, Saturday 12 June, at dusk and runs till late morning on Sunday. It seems to get bigger (and better) each year, and far more marketing goes into the event – islanders in central Malta have no doubt caught a billboard or two roadside.

It’s a wonderful, easy-going mishmash of a livestock show, heritage event and farmers’ market – and an excuse for local folk to get some air on summer night and have somewhere to go. It’s a prelude to the villlage festa, just two weeks away. Siggiewi’s unusually large, sloping and picturesque village piazza is already decked out with festa regalia. It’s heart-warming that Malta is beginning to relish its rural past, and to see skills, crafts and genuine Maltese produce appreciated by young and old, and locals and visitors alike. There are several rural events now, including the Mgarr’s Strawberry Fair, and Dingli’s Sheep & Goat festival.

What to Expect
Based on last year’s event. you can expect some: Pageantry: we had a reenactment of the Grand Master handing over a falcon to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as rental payment for the Maltese Islands.

Working machinery: Pride of place last year in the square was an ancient threshing machine that rattled and hummed into action, man atop loading straw, and was soon spewing out chaff all over the gathered crowd.

Artefacts of yesteryear: a small tent was set up last year housing old agricultural implements and canteen items that farmers would use in the fields to brew up coffee. In fact, you could see the brewing in action as nearby sat an old lady, in typical floral dress/apron, turning a coffee bean roaster over an open fire (see photo below). A stall next to her was serving the clove-flavoured coffee for free to an appreciative, and curious crowd.

Livestock: Falabella ponies, donkeys, prize sheep and goat breeds, some with their young, and a lama in pens which enthrall the kids. Sunday morning early is the ‘blessing’ of the animals and Sunday too saw some heavy horses on display.

Local Produce: both evening and morning saw stallholders selling some genuine local produce, including thyme honey, certified organic olive oil (impressively with an EU accreditation on it) and lots of peaches and tomatoes, which grow well in the Siggiewi area.

Roasting coffee beans, Maltese style

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Passed down the generations - how Malta's myths & legends survive

This title of this guest post speaks for itself. Malta of old, perhaps even today, is brim full of stories, folklore, legends, superstition, tradition and ritual.

Evarist Bartolo, Shadow Minister for Education and a lecturer in communications at the University of Malta, writes what seems a short story. But one can’t help wonder that some strange truth lies behind the episode he relates.

As a child, I lived with my grandmother and aunt near the sanctuary in Mellieha in one of the row of troglodyte houses with the bedroom and the kitchen in caves. Only the sitting room was constructed at the mouth of the cave and provided the simple façade of the house.

The devils were all around me as a child. Our grandmother made sure we knew that. Every summer evening, enjoying the fresh breeze, we all gathered outside on the pavement and street after sunset, and after dozing for 15 minutes through the rosary, I would wake up wide eyed to listen to her telling us what used to happen a long time ago in Mellieha.

At night I used to cover my head with the sheet to try not to see the flickering red light cast across the walls by the slow paraffin cooker on which a coffee pot was put to brew slowly all night for the morning. I was sure that the red light was coming from a crack in the rock and I was even surer that the crack led to hell, deep within the earth and from which any moment a devil might come to take me away.

I had seen the picture of the death of the bad man: a desperate man was looking down to the right corner of the room where he lay dying and a devil was coming out of the ground to take him away. “Because he lived a bad life” my grandmother told me over and over again.

I became even more alarmed when one evening she decided to tell us about the farmhouse that the devils built overnight on the edge of Mellieha: in the valley on your way down to Mellieha Bay the devils had decided to build a farmhouse. They built it in a night with huge blocks of stones. I did not dare ask why the devils had decided to take up farming in Mellieha. I simply decided that there was no way I would walk to that part of the village to check for myself the builders’ craftsdevilship.

I could see the devils working hard at night, cutting the big boulders, carrying them on their shoulders and building the farmhouse. I had no doubts whatsoever that the devils which looked like black and red lizards walking upright on their hind legs, dragging their long tail behind them, were very strong and could do whatever they liked, including building a large farmhouse in a night, after all they regularly dragged millions of sinners to hell where they roasted them and plunged sharp tridents into them.

So I never dared walk to the valley to see this farmhouse. I did not even know where it was exactly. Years later I chanced upon it as a teenager walking with my family when one of my sisters yelled at seeing a huge bale of straw approaching slowly over the hill. She was sure that the wizened old farmer was in fact one of the devils who had built the farmhouse and was now carrying that straw out of the silent farmhouse in the valley. Even that day I kept away from the farmhouse and decided to look at it safely from the other side of the valley.

I could understand perfectly what I read years later in Leonard Mahoney’s ‘5000 Years of Architecture in Malta’: “Superstitious farmers who tilled their lands in the vicinity never dreamt of making a closer acquaintance and so, protected by its name as much as by its solitude, it had stood unmolested for many years.” Is it a hunting lodge or a cow house? What did this building serve for? Who built it? Even Leonard Mahoney fails to answer these questions. “The food troughs (or mangers) are enormous and very high from the floor; evidence, as the local folk point out, that the (devil) owner of this farmhouse kept enormous (devil?) cows.”

He concedes: “But mystery wraps this building. There are no armorial bearings, or inscriptions, or even graffiti …to throw light on its original purpose or use.”

My grandmother might have been right after all and while I look at the solid windowless building on my way to Mellieha Bay I have yet to visit the place and enter it.

Photo: Courtesy of Walter Lo Cascio

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Ghana, a traditional music of the people, for the people. And not dying out!

The countries around the Mediterranean basin have more in common that just olives, limestone and sun. They nearly all have a rich culture of traditional music; a kind of homespun, vibrant, village, folkloristic and often impromptu musical heritage. This music, along with contemporary off-shoots of the traditional genres, is celebrated, now annually, in Malta’s Ghanafest held in Argotti Gardens, Floriana, 4-6 June and organised by the Malta Council for Culture & the Arts.

Ghanafest 2010 is once again more than simply three evenings renditions’ of Malta’s traditional Ghana. The programme sees groups and performers from Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt and Malta. The event is an eclectic blend of Arabic, Andalusian, Egyptian and Balkan beats and rhythms. From Malta, we see a variety of locally renowned Ghana musicians and singers as well as Maltese hip-hop from No Bling Show.

For the uninitiated or just plain curious, the festival is a wonderful opportunity to come to grips with Maltese Ghana in its various forms. If you know Ghana at all, you are probably familiar with the high-pitch singing, but that is just one form. Ghana covers: ‘Spirtu Pront’ (quick-wit), an improvised form of song duel (extremely difficult to perform yet done raucously and flawlessly by a few real professionals); ‘Tal-Fatt’ (factual), a composed narrative that may be fictional or based on true events; and ‘Fil-Għoli’ (high-pitched), a style of singing on a high vocal register.

Ghanafest itself promises three nights of all-round Mediterranean musical fun, and it all takes place in the magical night-time setting of Argotti Gardens perched on the bastions. It goes without saying that this is a family affair. There’s an artisan fair and Maltese food on offer, as well as a series of workshops on traditional instruments and a special programme for children.

This year’s edition of the festival is dedicated to Maltese folk guitarist Indri Brincat (il-Pupa) who passed away on the 24th of March 2010. Indri Brincat was also a renowned guitar maker.

Programme: see the Ghanafest website.

Festival Info
The Festival runs over three evenings, 4-6 June from 19:00, Argotti Gardens, Floriana – within walking distance from Valletta.
Tickets: €2 available at the door.
Parking available at the Floriana Boy Scouts headquarters, right next to the venue.

For more on Ghana, see Wikipedia.

Malta Council for Culture & the Arts

Photo: Ghanafest ‘07 performer. Photo by Jeremy de Maria, courtesy of MCCA.

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Madonnas: usual in churches, niches & festas; not usually found doorstepping you.

A day ago, I had a knock at the door just before 7pm. I rushed, thinking it was the postman as I was expecting an online purchase to arrive.

I opened to find, however, two late middle-aged ladies bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary.

It was about two feet high and in the regular pale, baby blue with rosy blushed cheeks and hands clasped in prayer. There was a moments pause while I did a double take, my mind now racing to whether I had any small change in my purse for some collection or other, or wondering whether they had come to preach on my doorstep. They too seemed a bit taken aback; I was obviously not Maltese and had a stunned look on my face which spelled out clearly that I had no idea at all what they wanted.

I said ‘Yes?’ with a hanging question mark. They paused, then one said ‘We’re taking the statue from house to house’. My brows furrowed and I think I said another ‘Yes?’. I was light years away still from fathoming their motive for being there or doing that. Statues are in churches, on street corners, in niches above doors and come out at village festa time. But never in my 16 years in Malta had I come across a small one going from house to house.

The ladies didn’t seem to know what to say next. The pause lingered. I decided that since they weren’t going to manage to explain, and I needed to get back to cooking, something had to be said or done to let us all get on. Since the thing wasn’t meant for my household – I was quite sure about that – I said the first thing I could think of that would end the situation, which was: ‘We’re protestant.’ They said ‘Oh’, smiled a faint smile and I closed the door.

An hour later, I was enlightened by the lady who baby sits my son. Apparently, the month of May is dedicated to the Rosary, and it’s a custom for the ’statue’ to reside for a week with a household before passing on to a neighbour. I am still not sure if the two occurrences are linked. The lady told me that she hadn’t had the statue for over 20 years in her house, and to think I’d passed on the opportunity. With 52 weeks a year and goodness known how many houses in my large village, it’s not surprising. I think a lot of Maltese don’t know about this tradition either, and it may be something that’s common in more rural areas or villages.

So, if you’re living here, have you had the statue in your house in living memory?

Photo: courtesy Mike krzeszak

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Bah, what's up? Oh, we're centre stage for once? Dingli Agricultural Fair

Had-Dingli, on Malta’s west coast, is holding a sheep and goat fair this Sunday, 25th April, on Dingli Cliffs in front of the small chapel of St Magdalena. For the early birds, it starts at the rise-and-shine hour of 7am but luckily runs most of the day for those of us who like a lie-in.

I have to admit, Sheep & Goat Fair was last year’s title. Strictly speaking, it’s billed this year as a ‘Traditional Agricultural Fair’ (Hidma Agrarja u Tradizzjanijiet), which means it has widened in scope to be a showcase of the agricultural life of the area, past and present. It will include a range of country displays, competitions, wine and food tastings, folk dancing, horse-drawn Karozzin rides, stalls, and fun and games, in addition to the goats and sheep.

There’s no place better than Dingli Cliffs to see these shaggy, mixed breed sheep and goats. It’s one of the few places you will see still these animals of indeterminate, but so useful a breed ambling along, plucking at weeds, shepherd somewhere alongside. It’s a real treat to come across them – a picture postcard shot of country life on our urban islands.

Sunday’s programme has plenty on it to while away a couple of hours and always plenty to engage the kids. I am sure there’ll be eats around, and not all Ġbejniet goats’ cheeselets either!

Fair Programme

From 7am-11am
Goat and Sheep Display
Milk competition with demonstration of how fresh cheeselets are made
Sheep milking demo

From 11am
Mass in front of the Chapel on the cliffs

During the Whole Day
Cultural and Ecological walks (worth noting that so-called Clapham Junction prehistoric ‘cart ruts’ are neaby, as is Buskett Gardens)
Rides in Karozzin – traditional horse drawn carriages
Wine Competition
Display of fresh fruit and vegetables
Traditional music, dancing and Ghana (Maltese folk singing)
Traditional games for children and adults
Various exhibitions of:
- Old-fashioned shepherds’ tools
- Maltese handicrafts
Displays by Dingli Scouts and Girl Guides

Related Posts
More info on Ghana, here (next Ghanafest, 4-6 June, 2010, Argotti Gardens. See What’s On for details.)
A lovely story about Maltese goats & yesteryear, click here
Agricultural Fair, Siggiewi (early June). Click here for what to expect. We will update once we have this year’s dates.

Photo: courtesy of Anne Muscat Scerri, Cloudberry Images.

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Five men make light work of a heavy statue or three. Say cheese.

There are 359 churches over 316 sq km in Malta.  That’s 1.14 churches per sq km. I believe that puts Malta slap behind the Vatican in terms of church coverage .  Now consider that we have 1,309 inhabitants per sq km, that 98% of Maltese are baptised Roman Catholic and every village has some band club of sorts and the theocracy maths starts getting complicated.

I live in Siggiewi, right behind the lovely baroque dome of St Nicholas parish church. You cannot get more village hard core than this. If I crane my neck, from my wi-fi station in the garden, the dome soars above the TV aerials and the water tanks and the pigeon coops.

Maundy Thursday is migraine day.   During the day, the bell ringing in incessant, perhaps to encourage visits to the  Last Supper pageant.  In the evening, at exactly 20.23 hrs the bell-ringing is replaced by a loud, relentless rattle.  It’s difficult to describe, except that it’s a horrible, slow, throaty, tuneless sound that could be a large, megaphoned cheese-grater or some special effect from a Hammer Horror film.  It scares the living daylight out of anyone aged 7 or under and means I will not sleep well right up to Easter Sunday, when the bell-ringing will be even more energetic, and hopefully more tuneful.

The second phenomenon is that from Maundy Thursday all the way to the evening of Good Friday, people go on a carcade of seven churches.  If you’re a kid, it’s an interesting ritual if you’re not prone to car-sickness, as you get to visit churches off the beaten track and compare tapestries, statues and overall opulence of the parish your parents happen to hit on.  And if you crash a village at the right time, you can also join the traditional, occasionally gruesome Good Friday procession and meet a Roman centurion or your own personal Jesus.

Add to this fasting, special confectioneries and theories about the weather and you have a uniquely Maltese cocktail of folklore, religion and superstition rolled into one.

I wonder how many people on Good Friday are barricaded like me, in a village core besieged by the madding crowds clocking up the church count, to the backdrop of a grating rattle.  And to think that in just over a fortnight, the Pope visits Malta and Siggiewi becomes a pit stop in the whirlwind tour.

Photo: Andrew Galea Debono

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Comino, so desolate, yet so rich a part of Malta's story

This is the first guest post from Evarist Bartolo, Shadow Minister for Education and a lecturer in communications at the University of Malta. More than 30 years ago, he taught one of Malta Inside Out’s founders, Alex Grech, to write and appreciate English literature.

There are at least 500 islands in the Mediterranean. One of them has six inhabitants: four men and two women. The youngest is a 42-year old man; the oldest is a woman, twice his age.

Throughout the last 23 centuries pirates, hermits, prisoners of war, exiled knights, farmers and tourists have settled the island. Some 80 years ago, one of the German prisoners of World War I held there, built a water mill driven by a rat. Apart from rats, bats and wild rabbits, most of the inhabitants there have been pigs.

2,500 years ago, the navigator Scillace called it ‘Lampas’. Cluverius called it ‘Hephaestia’. 1,800 years ago Ptolemy referred to it as ‘Chemmona’. ‘Kineni’ in Greek means nearest to and Comino lies nearest to Malta. The Arabs called it ‘Kemmuna’ perhaps a corruption of the Greek word, or a reference to the plant of ‘kemmun’ (cumin) which covered large areas of the island at the time.

In 1285, Abulafia, one of the earliest Cabalists and born in Saragossa in 1240, arrived on Comino to live there for three years during which he compiled his “Sefer ha-Ot” (The Book of the Sign).

Five years before he found refuge in Comino, Abulafia went to Rome to convert Pope Nicholas III to the ideal that Moslems, Jews and Christians could live together in harmony, instead of persecuting one another. He fled to Comino after being flung into prison for four weeks in Rome and then having to leave Palermo hastily as his teachings were considered too dangerous and he was going to be stoned by the people.

While Abulafia lived in a cave at one end of the island, at the other end pirates sheltered in the bays and caves which were excellent hiding places for them for many centuries. We know of at least two local hermits who lived there for some time. A small Catholic community must have lived there over 600 years ago, big enough to sustain a medieval chapel.

The island was probably abandoned when the raids by corsairs became frequent, as the inhabitants had no fortifications in which to seek refuge. In the 15th century, taxes had been collected by imposing an excise duty on wine imported from Sicily but the money was not used for the tower that had been planned for Comino. In 1533 Grand Master l’Isle Adam also commissioned a plan for a tower on the island but again this project fizzled out.

Grand Master Wignacourt built the existing tower in 1620 and 30 soldiers were stationed there. At this time, knights who had misbehaved in Malta were punished by being sent to Comino.

The island was to serve as a prison camp on a number of occasions. At the end of the French occupation, Comino was used for French prisoners, Maltese who were accused of spying for the French and common criminals.

150 years ago, farmers from Naxxar settled on Comino and started growing crops. The 1881 population census for the Maltese Islands tells us that 20 males and 13 females lived in Comino. Ten years later, the population had increased by 10: 25 males and 18 females. Nearly half of the inhabitants, 17, were children under the age of five.

In 1912, Comino served as a site for an isolation hospital for cholera victims. Soldiers wounded in the war of the Dardanelles were also sent to Comino for treatment. The hospital building still stands there.

Several times during the last 200 years there were several big projects to make use of Comino, including a big pig farm in 1993, when the island was considered ideal to rebuild the Maltese and Gozitan pig industry after African swine fever disease destroyed it.

Comino is a small rock that has seen almost as many twists and turns of fate as its larger sister islands. These days, apart from its six residents, it’s home to one hotel, seasonal staff and tourists, numerous sea craft and a very popular blue lagoon.

Photo: Therese Debono

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Not child's artwork, but messy, gooey, gorgeous prinjolata carnival cake

This is a cake designed to appeal to kids, or the kid in us adults. While Christmas cakes are ice-rink smooth perfection, the prinjolata, which starts appearing in cafés and confectioners in late January and therefore well before carnival, is a mound of mess. Splattered with melted chocolate, pine nuts and glacé cherries glowing neon artificial green and red, the prinjolata is like a kids’ art session crossed with a Betty Crocker Angel Food Cake.

Its name comes from prinjol, pine nut, which is similar to the Italian word, pinoli. But pine nuts seem to be just a bit of decoration. The cake itself, which can be a counter-top mountain (as in the St James’ Cavalier café), is made of cream, sponge, citrus peel and biscuits. It has a substantial calorie count with its condensed milk and a bit of a boozy bite to it with its Vermouth content.

My son drools when he sees it. I have to say my stomach turns at its grotesque carnival appearance. But I do admit that it is the epitomé of pre-Lent excess and puts the Protestant Shrove Tuesday pancake in the shade. The prinjolata certainly does use up any fattening ingredients that might be in the store cupboard.

If you feel like giving it a go at home, this seems a good recipe source for it. Decorating it could make for a fun mid-term activity with the kids. If you fancy tasting it, cafés sell it by the slice, and some places have smaller, almost individual-sized plated domes of it for sale. You’ll need a sweet tooth to enjoy it; seeing it is the greater pleasure I think.

Photo: Peter Grima [Know Malta]

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