Traditions

Every Maltese parish has a patron saint, and every saint gets a full week of attention. Somewhere between eighty and a hundred festi run across Malta and Gozo each year, most between late May and September, so on any summer weekend at least one village is dressed up: damask inside the church, statues on pedestals along the streets, strings of lights on the façade. The pattern barely changes. Weeknight masses build up to the eve, when the marċ (band march) turns into a slow-moving street party and the nar tal-art (ground fireworks, Catherine wheels spinning on poles) takes over the square towards midnight. On Sunday evening the titular statue comes out on the shoulders of eight sweating men, to confetti, band music and murtali (aerial petards) you feel in your chest. The machinery behind it all is the każin tal-banda (band club), a 19th-century invention modelled partly on British military bands; villages with two rival clubs (Ħaż-Żebbuġ has had duelling bands for more than 150 years) celebrate with extra spite. Pick any festa within bus reach, arrive around 19:00, buy qubbajt (nougat) from a stall and stay for the fireworks. Nobody needs a ticket.

The ġostra is what happens when a village feast meets a harbour and two centuries of stubbornness. A pole, around 16 metres of it, is fixed at an angle from the quay out over the sea and coated with lard, buckets of the stuff. Competitors take a run at it, barefoot, one at a time, trying to reach the flags tied near the tip. Physics wins almost every round: most attempts end two or three seconds later with a slap into the water and a cheer from the crowd. The technique, passed down within families, involves running on the sides of your feet and falling with some dignity. You can watch it during the feast of St Joseph in Msida in late July, and at Spinola Bay during the feast of St Julian in the last week of August, where three flags are traditionally at stake, among them a Belgian one, because St Julian is said to have been born at Ath in present-day Belgium. The game has been played at Maltese feasts for over 200 years and shows no sign of becoming sensible.

Twice a year the Grand Harbour stops being a cruise-terminal backdrop and goes back to being a race track. On 31 March (Freedom Day, marking the departure of the last British forces in 1979) and 8 September (Victory Day, marking the end of the Great Siege of 1565), crews from the harbour districts (Senglea, Vittoriosa, Cospicua, Kalkara, Marsa, Marsamxett and Birżebbuġa) row traditional wooden boats over a straight course of about a kilometre down the harbour. The boats are the old working craft of the port, dgħajjes (passage boats) and kajjikki (fishing skiffs), painted in district colours; the prize is the aggregate shield and a year of unbearable smugness in the winning town's bars. Senglea and Vittoriosa take the whole thing roughly as seriously as a small war. Rowing races in the harbour go back to celebrations under the Knights tied to the 8 September feast of Our Lady of Victories, which is why the September edition matters most. Watch for free from the Senglea or Vittoriosa waterfronts, or from Valletta's Lower Barrakka Gardens, with the commentary echoing off the bastions.

Good Friday in Malta is solemn, theatrical and taken entirely seriously. About twenty towns (fourteen in Malta, six in Gozo) hold processions in which heavy statues of the Passion, the vari, are carried at a funereal pace through the streets: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crucifixion, the Pietà, one after another, each on the shoulders of eight or more bearers. Brass bands play funeral marches between them. Some penitents walk barefoot dragging chains shackled to their ankles, hooded so their neighbours cannot tell who is repenting for what. The custom reaches back to the end of the 16th century, when Rabat held the earliest procession of this kind; Birgu's dates from the early 17th century, and during the 18th century Valletta, Żebbuġ, Qormi, Naxxar and others followed. Since the 1970s most processions have grown into full pageants, with hundreds of costumed biblical characters and Roman soldiers on horseback. Żebbuġ, Mosta and Valletta stage the big ones. Shops shut, the bars go quiet, and even the fireworks factories take the day off.

Carnival arrived with the Knights and never left. It was already being celebrated (and complained about) in the 1530s, when Grand Master Piero de Ponte tried to rein in the revelry, which tells you how quickly the Maltese had taken to it. Under the Order it acquired the parata, a sword dance re-enacting the victory of 1565, and the kukkanja games, and by 1730 there were proper street parades. Today it runs for five days before Lent, usually in February. Valletta and Floriana host the official version: enormous mechanised floats with King Carnival at their head, dance companies in sequins competing in front of judges, grandstands along the main streets. The counterweight is Nadur in Gozo, where an unofficial night carnival takes over the village: no floats, no judges, just locals in home-made and deliberately unsettling costumes drifting through the streets in silence or worse. Between the two, eat prinjolata, the pine-nut-and-sponge tower that appears in every confectioner's window for the season and vanishes just as abruptly on Ash Wednesday.

L-Imnarja, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul on 29 June, is the closest Malta gets to a harvest festival, and it is probably the island's oldest celebration. The name comes from the Latin luminaria, after the bonfires and illuminations that once marked the eve. The religious feast belongs to Mdina Cathedral; the fun belongs to Buskett, the wooded gardens below Verdala Palace, where on the night of 28 June families settle in with fenkata (rabbit fried in garlic and wine) while għana, Malta's drawn-out, improvised folk singing, carries on into the small hours. There is an agricultural show too: prize vegetables, rabbits, honey and livestock, all judged with complete seriousness. On the feast day itself, horses race bareback up Saqqajja Hill at Rabat, a spectacle once held under the patronage of the Grand Master, with the winners' palji (banners) presented at the stone loggia that still stands near the top. Folklore has it that a groom would promise his bride a trip to the Imnarja fair in her first year of marriage; these days the 50–56 buses from Valletta do the honours.

The quċċija is Malta's fortune-telling ritual for one-year-olds, recorded since the 18th century and still standard at first-birthday parties. The mechanics are simple: a selection of objects is laid out on the floor or a tray, the baby is set down in front of them, and whatever it grabs first is taken as a forecast of its future. Rosary beads mean a priest or nun; a hard-boiled egg means a life of plenty; a book, a teacher or lawyer; money, business; scissors, a tailor; a stethoscope, a doctor. Modern parents slip in calculators, USB sticks and the occasional aeroplane ticket, and everyone pretends not to nudge the desirable options forward. The word appears to be related to the Sicilian cuccìa, a boiled-wheat dish, and an older, grimmer quċċija custom involved distributing food to the poor when someone died; how that turned into a birthday game is anyone's guess. As a visitor you will not find it advertised (it happens in living rooms), but if a Maltese family invites you to a first birthday, now you know what the tray on the floor is for.

Malta took the Italian crib tradition and made it a national craft. The earliest documented presepju (nativity crib) on the island was set up in 1617 at the Dominican priory in Rabat, and by the 19th century no Maltese Christmas was complete without one. The classic version is a landscape of papier-mâché grottoes filled with pasturi, the clay figures: shepherds, the innkeeper, the man with a sack, the obligatory sleeping figure who misses the whole thing. Beside it goes the ġulbiena: vetch or wheat seeds grown in the dark for around five weeks until they throw long white shoots, arranged around the crib or the Baby Jesus. The tradition owes its modern reach to San Ġorġ Preca, who from 1921 had the children of his MUSEUM society build cribs at home, and who started the Christmas Eve procession with the statue of the Baby Jesus in Ħamrun that year, a procession practically every parish still holds. In December you will find crib exhibitions in band clubs and church halls everywhere; the biggest production is Bethlehem f'Għajnsielem on Gozo, a 20,000-square-metre live nativity village with actors and animals, open from mid-December.

Għana (the għ is silent, say 'aa-na') is Malta's folk song: two singers trading improvised rhymed verses over unhurried guitar, each politely demolishing the other's argument. That duelling form is spirtu pront ('quick wit'). There is also tal-fatt, a long ballad recounting a true story, usually involving a murder or a shipwreck, and il-Bormliża, a high-wire style from Bormla demanding such a vocal range that almost nobody attempts it now. Before the war, women sang għana over the washing; afterwards it moved into bars and każini (village clubs) and became a largely male affair, which it remains. UNESCO added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2021, which amused the għannejja (singers) who had been at it in Marsa bars all along. Hear it at Għanafest, held each June in the Argotti Gardens in Floriana, or at Buskett Gardens on the eve of L-Imnarja, 28 June, where the singing runs into the small hours. Off-season, try a Sunday morning in a bar in Żejtun or Marsa. Sessions are informal, and nobody minds a stranger who buys a round and listens.

Walk the quay at Marsaxlokk and every luzzu (the traditional wooden fishing boat, painted yellow, blue, red and green) stares back at you. A pair of eyes sits on each bow (l-għajn, 'the eye'), and fishermen will tell you they watch for danger and see the boat safely home, warding off the evil eye while they're at it. The custom is usually traced to the Phoenicians, who painted eyes on their ships, as did the Greeks and Egyptians; hence the borrowed names Eye of Osiris and Eye of Horus. In truth nobody can prove an unbroken chain across nearly three thousand years. What can be proven is that no Maltese fisherman will paint over them, and when a hull is redone the eyes go back on first. The working fleet shrinks every year. Plenty of luzzijiet now carry tourists round the harbour instead of lampuki (dorado), but the eyes survive the career change. Best viewing is Marsaxlokk on a Sunday morning during the fish market, when the fleet is in; bus 81 from Valletta drops you by the quay. For homework, watch Luzzu (2021), Alex Camilleri's film about a fisherman deciding whether to sell his boat. This is exactly that world.

Bizzilla is Maltese bobbin lace: dozens of wooden bobbins clicking over a stuffed pillow, pins marking out the pattern, hands moving too fast to follow. Lace was made here from the sixteenth century, but the craft had all but died by the early 1800s. The revival was deliberate: in the 1830s Lady Hamilton Chichester brought lace makers over from Genoa to reteach it as poverty relief, and Queen Victoria did her bit by ordering sixteen dozen pairs of lace mitts and a scarf. The local product soon developed its own signature: the eight-pointed cross of St John worked into the mesh, still the surest way to spot genuine Maltese work. After the Great Exhibition of 1851 it became fashionable enough that Gozo in particular lived off lace exports for decades. Today the craft hangs on by its fingernails: mostly older women in Gozitan villages such as Ta' Sannat and Xagħra, some of whom still work on their doorsteps in the warmer months. Watch it being made at the Ta' Dbieġi crafts village in San Lawrenz, and buy from the maker: a genuine handmade piece costs proper money, and the €5 souvenir stuff is machine-made import.

A pastizz is a diamond of impossibly flaky pastry filled with either warm ricotta or a paste of curried peas, eaten standing up, ideally at 2am. Convention says ricotta ones are folded down the middle and pea ones along the side, so you can tell what you are getting before you have committed. The pastry is Malta's food history in miniature: a laminated dough with plausible Arab and Sicilian ancestry, perfected in small corner shops called pastizzeriji. At around 50 to 60 cents each, they are eaten by every plumber, lawyer and nightclub casualty in the country. The temple of the tradition is Crystal Palace (officially Is-Serkin) by the Mdina gate in Rabat, going since the 1940s and named after the south London district the British troops stationed here came from; I have rarely managed to find it shut. Order 'tnejn tal-irkotta' (two ricotta ones) and tea in a glass, take them to the low wall outside, and mind the pigeons. One rule worth keeping: a pastizz gone cold is a pastizz to refuse. It only means they are not selling fast enough.