Greetings!
It took us six hours to get to and from Goso today, an island one-third the size of Malta off the northern coast. There have been proposals to build a bridge or a tunnel there, but all were discarded. Much of the time was just getting through Malta's small towns between central Valletta and the coastal port at the town of Cirkewwa. Ferries between there and the port of Mgarr on Gozo run every 25 minutes, and the round-trip fare is only about five Euros. We had coachs on either end, and did experience a mechanical problem opening the coach door at one end.
The first inhabitants of Gozo came from Sicily about 5,000 BC. They were farmers, and only a thousand years earlier transitioned from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. Two of the structures (Ggantija) temples were erected more than 5500 years ago, before the pyramids of Egypt. They are the second oldest existing manmade religious structures after Gobleki Teke in present day Turkey.
The temples are built in the typical clover-leaf shape, with inner-facing blocks. The space between the walls was filled with rubble. A series of semi-circular apses is connected with a central passage covered by roofing. The effort is a remarkable feat when considering the monuments were constructed when the wheel had not yet been introduced and no metal tools were available to the Maltese Islanders.
An island trip wouldn't be complete without a visit to the cliffs edge. We declined to take a ride in small boats out to an famous rock arch (
the Azure Window) at Dwejra Bay which had collapsed recently. Instead, we visited several really old windmills (1725), where millars called farmers to bring their grain by blowing through
triton shells.
We ended the visit with a drive to the
Roman Catholic Cathedral in the Cittadella of Victoria, the capital of Gozo. The highest point on the island, its history epitomizes the many eras and architectural structures which have appeared. Begun as a prehistoric settlement, then a Roman temple, it became a Christian and later a Byzantine church. Recovered from early Arab destruction, a parish church was enlarged during the 15th and 16th centuries, then sacked by the Ottomans during the invasion of 1551. Rebuilt once the island was retaken, it was damaged by an earthquake in 1693. Finally, the present cathedral was begun in September of 1697.
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