Paola und das Hypogäum

Nobody comes to Paola for Paola, which is exactly why I like it. It is a proper southern town: the recently repaved pjazza (main square), old boys on benches outside the band clubs, and some of the best-value pastizzi (flaky ricotta or pea pastries) on the island, still well under a euro. The dome you can see from half of Malta belongs to Christ the King, the country's biggest church, and the town also holds the island's main mosque, which tells you how unfussy the place is. But down a residential side street, under an ordinary terraced block on Triq iċ-Ċimiterju, lies the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum: an underground temple and burial complex five millennia old, where you descend in a group of ten, in near darkness, and come back up quieter than you went in. Book weeks ahead; only 80 people a day get in. Afterwards, walk ten minutes to the Tarxien Temples, then have lunch back on the square like a local.

In 1902 workmen cutting water cisterns for new housing broke through into something nobody expected: a three-level burial complex carved into the living rock between roughly 3600 and 2500 BC, with red-ochre spirals on the ceilings and chambers dressed to mimic the megalithic temples above ground. Fr Manuel Magri began the excavation; after his death in 1907, Sir Themistocles Zammit took over, recovering the remains of thousands of individuals and the 'Sleeping Lady' figurine, now in Valletta's National Museum of Archaeology. UNESCO listed the Hypogeum in 1980, and after long closures for conservation it reopened in 2017 with its microclimate strictly controlled, hence the daily cap of 80 visitors. The town above is far younger: Grand Master Antoine de Paule founded it in 1626 as a planned settlement, and Maltese speakers still call it Raħal Ġdid, 'new town'. It grew with the naval dockyard, was bombed for the same reason in the Second World War, and gained its outsized landmark, Ġużè Damato's Christ the King basilica, begun in 1936 and consecrated in 1967.

Der Ort heute