Marsaxlokk
Der SüdostenLuzzu-Boote, sonntags Fischstände und Mittagessen im Freien: das Fischerdorf, in das Malteser ihre Gäste bringen.
Dieser Guide ist vorerst auf Englisch. Das Wesentliche ist übersetzt.
Der Ort heute
Yes, it photographs well: the harbour full of luzzijiet (traditional fishing boats) painted yellow, blue and red, each with the Eye of Osiris on the prow. But Marsaxlokk is a working port, not a film set. Come at dawn and you will see the night's catch landed; come on Sunday morning and the quayside stalls are a genuine fish market, heavy with lampuki (dolphinfish) from late August into winter. On weekdays the same stalls mostly sell tablecloths and fridge magnets, so time your visit accordingly. The village's 3,400 residents live off fish twice over: catching it, then cooking it in the line of seafront restaurants where a grilled catch of the day runs €25 or so and Sunday lunch tables are a small war. Walk twenty minutes out along Delimara and you reach St Peter's Pool, a natural limestone lido where local teenagers dive well into October. The power station chimney at the far end of the bay? Everyone learns to crop it out.
Wie er hierher kam
The name is a plain description (marsa is Arabic for harbour, xlokk the south-east wind), and the harbour is why everyone came. On the Tas-Silġ hill above the village, one sanctuary served worshippers for some four thousand years: a temple of the Tarxien phase became a Phoenician shrine of Astarte, then the Roman temple of Juno that Cicero says the corrupt governor Verres looted. The Ottoman armada anchored here in May 1565 to open the Great Siege; Napoleon's fleet used the same water in June 1798. The Knights had answered the first invasion with Fort St Lucian (1610–11), Wignacourt's heaviest coastal work, still commanding the bay. Marsaxlokk itself only became a parish in 1897, its church built after a marchioness's vow when she survived a storm at sea. In December 1989 the superpowers met here: Bush and Gorbachev declared the Cold War over aboard the storm-tossed Maxim Gorky: the 'Seasick Summit'. Today the bay holds fishing boats, a power station and the Freeport's containers, all at once.