Malta Conference: Part Three

Although many speak Maltese at home, for most, the working language is English. Aside from the fact that Valetta and the buildings of the other towns are mostly made from local tan-golden sandstone, the urban architecture resembles London’s Victorian Whitehall district, except for the Ottoman Turkish influenced bay windows which look like what one would find in some neighborhoods of Istanbul.

The Maltese drive on the ‘British’ side of the road, and their ‘fusion’ food even has a touch English fare, the blandness of which is corrected by North African spices and Italian zest. As one walks down the streets of Valetta - and I say walk, as much of the whole down town is a pedestrian mall - one sees many Rolex watches and designer clothes. Malta is the Switzerland of the Mediterranean. Much money is managed and changes hands in Malta.

To our regret, the famous military museum in Valetta was closed due to renovations. We had wanted to see the artifacts relating to the history of Malta, especially artifacts associated with the Knights of Malta and their war with the Turks during the sixteenth century. But we were able to spend some time in St. John’s co-cathedral, 1573-78, the convention church of the Order of St. John which had originated during the Crusades and from which the Knights of Malta had evolved. The lavish early baroque interior, which contains tombs of Grand Masters of the Order, has wonderful mosaics made from semi-precious stones from the whole area of the Mediterranean.

During the last part of our visit to the Maltese Islands, we were a able to have a half day excursion to Gozo, the other larger Maltese island, which is altogether agricultural and consists of little towns, fishing and farming villages, green houses and fields

Though all of its buildings seem to be constructed of the same tan-golden sandstone as the cities on the larger island, the contrast to the main island of Malta is striking, as Gozo is as rural as Malta is urban. When visiting the Maltese Museum of Art in Valetta, we had noted that except for the ancient inhabitants of the island, the Maltese had produced little art (again, think Switzerland!), but rural Gozo proved to be the exception, as the contemporary pottery and glass made there is exquisite both in design and texture. But what is most striking are the colors - beautiful, blues, greens and yellows. We brought home gifts for relatives and friends and a little vase for ourselves. 

I just mentioned above that the art of the ancient Maltese is exceptional as well. Here I was referring to the Hagar Qim Temple and the ‘Hypogeum’. These ancient sites date from 3600 to 3000 B.C.E.. The Hagar Qim temple is above ground and consists of monoliths – single stones – resembling Stonehenge in southern England, although these sites predate it, and, like the temples in England, no one is quite sure how they set the stones in place. In contrast, to the above ground temple, the Hypogeum, (Gr. = underground) a necropolis with vast chambers carved out of living stone, is the reverse architecture of the above-ground temples. It is the ‘dark’ version of the above ground temples which are bathed in light. These vast chambers of the Hypogeum once housed the remains of as many as seven thousand humans.

Malta is a microcosmic version of our increasingly universalizing and homogenizing planet. Malta, so it seems, is an older version of our world, and, alas, a version of our future.  

We were familiar with much of Italy but never had we been to Sicily, and because of its close proximity to Malta, it seemed that Sicily was the right place to go at the right time, and so, to Sicily we did go. I look forward to writing about what we saw and did there, as this will be the next installment.     

Malta Conference: Part Two

There were professors from all over the planet, representing the traditional academic disciplines, along with a chapter of Hell’s Angels, whose colors on their vests announced that they were from Manchester. It appeared that because perhaps 20% of their group had no winged skull embossed on the back their vests, that some of them had not yet earned the colors, and I think that perhaps this was either some kind of training or an award for being good acolytes. I don’t know exactly how many of the Hell’s Angels cadre and acolytes were in attendance, but their numbers were enough to take up considerable space in the bar. The Manchester group also was attended by the company of four or five ladies, who distinguished themselves by their astonishingly high heel shoes and skintight jeans, worn both in the bar and at the fabulous breakfasts. The scholars and the bikers got along by ignoring each other, both groups likely flattering themselves by thinking they had absolutely nothing in common.

The conference itself was representative of how various traditional liberal arts disciples are following a new but now much practiced procedure that is leading to the transforming of conference papers into journal articles. This is the new ‘scientific’ way most journal literature today is created both for the internet and for library hard-copies. This is just another example of how our technology – especially our electronic technology - is transforming all that is done today. Perhaps in future I will be able to send a cloned copy of myself to conferences, the my double fashioned by a 3 D printer into which my consciousness will be down-loaded from a super M.R.I, while I stay home and read Plato, have a glass of wine with my wife and friends or just go fly fishing.

I heard some good presentations, most notably the findings of a study by an Indian anthropologist from the University of Mangalore who had followed aged immigrants from India to the West, especially to America and to Canada. The findings were that even with support from families, the aged immigrants almost never adapted and could have just as well be living on another planet in a different age. This was a sad but not too surprising finding, and probably tells us much about how we as part of the ‘native’ population rarely consider such. This is surely the case of ‘too late to assimilate’ in the increasingly ‘Universal and Homogeneous State’, that is becoming our planet.

And then there was the excellent paper given by, Ann Dunn, a Shakespeare scholar from the University of North Carolina in Ashville, a study of Shakespeare’s ‘Roman Plays’. My wife and I became friends with Ann who also is the director of the Ashville Ballet.

Malta is about sixty nautical miles from Sicily to its East and equidistant from Tunisia to the West and South. Malta really is at the cross roads of the Mediterranean. Many have crossed, conquered and ruled what is now the tiny Maltese state: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Venetians, and, of course, the British, who let go of their former colony only in 1964. As a result of this long British rule, Malta has a definite British stamp.