An Overview of Malta

Like I mentioned in a previous post, over the New Year holiday I travelled to Malta to visit my SO and to meet his family and friends.  It was originally my intention to blog while I was there, but I had not accounted for the fact that in Europe hotels don’t have free WiFi as often as hotels in the U.S. do.  As a result, I ended up keeping track things the old-fashioned way - with pen and paper - and over the next few weeks will be transcribing those writings onto my blog.  In the meantime, I thought I’d give a quick and dirty overview of Malta, since it’s not too far fetched that many people had never heard of it before I mentioned (I hadn’t before meeting people from Malta).

So first the basics:  Malta is a tiny country located in the Mediterranean right between mainland Europe and North Africa.  To find it on a map, first find Italy, then go south to Sicily, and south again.  It’s not a well known country outside of Europe, probably due to its size, but its history and landscape has earned it cameos in a variety of video games, movies, and television series. 

As far as historical facts are concerned, the islands that make up the country now known as Malta have been inhabited since pre-history.  They have structures far older than the Egyptian pyramids (the megalithic temples and hypogeum), with twenty-three known temple sites, suggesting that at one point the islands had a pretty big spiritual significance Fast-forward a bit, and the islands again get some spiritual fame as the site where Paul washed up after a shipwreck (resulting in a neat story of why there are no poisonous snakes on Malta), and as the headquarters of the Knights of St. John (sort of like the Knights Templar, but older). The islands played a big part in several wars and conflicts (including WWII when it was under British rule).

The earliest settlers that I could find information about were from what is now Sicily, and after them it was the Greeks/Romans/Phoenicians. Following a period of being relatively uninhabited, the islands were re-colonized by people from the Sicilian-Arab culture (bringing with them a sort of Arabic language that would eventually evolve into Maltese). At some point the Knights of St. John took over, then I think the French, and finally the British. Malta only became its own nation midway through the twentieth century, in 1964.

Today, Malta seems mostly Mediterranean, with heavy British influence in the structure of some of their institutions (the fact that they speak English being the most prominent). There’s also a strong connection to the Catholic Church and to community (though I sense both are decreasing), resulting in a few little quirks of culture here and there that I didn’t see anywhere else I travelled in Europe. Overall the culture is a bit difficult for me to quantify in any broad sense, so I hope my future posts give a better idea of the island than I have here!