Living heritage: Fortress Valletta as an encounter with history

My knees trembled, looking down into a deep moat. I slowly walk across a narrow bridge, guiding me to the entrance to Valletta (1). I vividly recall the sense of relief once reaching the wide square right behind. I remember this city’s narrow streets, high facades and the ever-returning sight of the sea. Valletta unveiled itself as a fortress-city: structured, highly concentrated, yet designed to be self-conscious, on the constant look-out for external threat.

            In our classroom discussion, my feelings were shared by many others. The fortress-city of Valletta made many students wonder what the historical origins were of these architectures, and how their historicity continued to speak so vividly to modern tourists. Following the Ottomans’ failed siege of Malta in 1565, Grand Master Jean de Vallette laid the first stone for the island’s new capital. Valletta became the seat of the Knights of Saint John, a military order appointed by the Pope to defend the Mediterranean against the threat of non-Christianity. This new city unfolded within a grid structure, in which a plethora of churches, auberges and palazzi enjoyed protection from an extensive network of bastions and ramparts (figure 1). Within decades, Valletta emerged as a convention centre of European church officials and aristocrats, distanced from the impoverished Maltese population that sustained itself with agriculture and fishing. For the Knights, Valletta was designed as a microcosm in which Europe’s most privileged and powerful could shield themselves from the idea of the non-European, non-Christian threat.

            Following the departure of the Knights, the British continued to employ Valletta as the centre of the island, constructing an opera house and gardens within ramparts that had lost their original functionality by that point. However, within and around Fortress Valletta, the city’s literal and metaphorical fortifications are also subverted. Following our classroom discussion, I, amongst other students, went into the city to have lunch. One student, wanting to swim, discovered via a tourist app that a beach was hidden amongst the ramparts. We walked through the city’s narrow alleys to find a stairwell taking us along the ramparts down to a small beach (figure 2; no. 16 on map). On these rocks, we sat, chatted, and jumped into the clear blue water of the Mediterranean. Our view extended from the Lower Barakka Gardens to Saint Angelo’s Fortress, from British colonial palaces to the medieval maze of Birgu. We looked around, walked across the rocks and took a lot of pictures. In this memorable moment, we found a complete kind of relaxation, in oblivion of the histories that were haunting us.

            On closer inspection, Valletta’s realities still came biting back. On the rocks we used as a beach, small, one-room houses were built (figure 3). Many doors were closed, walls unpainted, one roof even completely collapsed. When were these houses built? Who was living here? Why would these tenements be built outside, instead of inside Fortress Valletta? The pastels-coloured paint with which the houses were painted, contrasted to the wall’s eroding stones, with plants growing out and lizards climbing through the cracks. The attachment of this neighbourhood, similar to a favela, to an enormous, 16^th-century limestone wall challenges not just this wall’s historicity, but our touristic expectation of this heritage as well. The fortifications of Valletta have often been understood as military or political protections. Here, these fortifications continue to live as barriers in processes of social stratification. A kind of privilege, for example a touristic kind, is required to cross those boundaries. Our post-modern Grand Tour thus expressed a similar kind of cultural capital to the thousands of early modern aristocrats, Catholic clergy and intellectuals that once frequented Valletta. As tourist-students, we carry the expectation that architectural heritage emerges as cleansed and clearly demarcated. This time, an enormous, 16^th-century limestone wall pulsated with unmediated life.

            Following our staying at this rocky beach, we returned into Valletta’s city centre to enjoy a tour. As we continued sweating and strolling around, we were tempted to forget what it was we came to experience in the first place. As students of cultural anthropology, we travel to Valletta to encounter differences. I am starting to think that my being overwhelmed with this city’s fortifications originates neither with its inherently available past, nor with the social construction of its historicity (2). Rather, the fear and confusion I felt upon my first sight of the city gate in fact emerges as an encounter of Valletta’s history as an anthropological difference (3). The massive limestone ramparts and bastions of Fortress Valletta dominate us so profoundly, because they confront us with a rupture between our touristic presence and the culture in which these fortifications were originally created and used. I can only look forward to encountering how Valletta, as this year’s European Capital of Culture, opens new chapters in the long lives of its architectures.

(1) Valletta proper should be distinguished from the surrounding metropolitan area, which extends across the northern coast of the island and contains the vast majority of its population.

(2) See Burgers, ‘Heritage: the theory and practice of the latest critical heritage studies, applied to a typical Mediterranean village’, Lecture, June 7, 2018.

(3) See Ankersmit, Sublime historical experience, Stanford: 2005.

Figure 1. Stockdale, Plan of the city of Malta, 1800. Retrieved from Historic Cities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Figure 2. Rampart and beach, Valletta, Malta, 2018. Image courtesy of author.

Figure 3. Houses, beach and ramparts, Valletta, Malta, 2018. Image courtesy of author.