Ġgantija

Interesting facts

Ġgantija is regarded as the second-oldest surviving human-built religious structure in the world, younger only than Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

The temple gave its name to a whole chapter of prehistory: the Ġgantija phase, roughly 3600–3200 BC, when Maltese temple building first took monumental form.

Its outer walls are of hard coralline limestone, while the softer globigerina limestone was saved for doorways, altars and carved decorative slabs inside.

Fragments of plaster stained with red ochre show that the inner walls were once smoothed over and painted rather than left as bare stone.

Spiral reliefs like those at Tarxien once decorated the temples, but they have weathered away and are known mainly from Brocktorff's early nineteenth-century drawings.

The gap between the inner apse walls and the massive outer wall was packed with rubble and earth, a building trick shared by the other Maltese temples.

The northern temple is the younger of the pair and ends in a shallow niche instead of a fifth apse, a later stage in the evolution of the temple plan.

Ġgantija was inscribed alone on the World Heritage List in 1980; in 1992 five more temples joined it and the listing was renamed the Megalithic Temples of Malta.

Some followers of the modern Goddess movement call the two buildings the Mother and Daughter Temple, reading them as a shrine to a female deity.

Temple building on Malta and Gozo ended around 2500 BC, more than a thousand years after Ġgantija was raised, and the culture behind it vanished.

Why it is worth it

Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the second island of the Maltese archipelago, and it is the oldest of the megalithic temples that make up the Maltese World Heritage listing. Its two temples were raised around 3600 BC, which puts them centuries ahead of the Egyptian pyramids. The name means "place of giants", and Gozitan folklore explains the colossal blocks with a giantess called Sansuna who, the story goes, lived on broad beans and honey and carried the stones here with a baby on her shoulder.

What you see is a pair of temples built side by side and wrapped in a single boundary wall, plus the start of a third that never got beyond part of its façade. The southern temple is the larger, the older and the better preserved: five great apses, walls that still rise about six metres, and patches of the plaster that once covered the rough stone clinging between the blocks. Just inside the entrance is a big block with a hollow in it, often read as a basin for washing before worshippers went further in. Like Mnajdra on the main island, the complex faces south-east towards the equinox sunrise. Look out for the stone spheres near the walls, which scholars think served as rollers for moving the megaliths.

The site was known to locals long before anyone dug it. A plan drawn in the late 18th century by Jean-Pierre Houël turned out to be remarkably accurate, and a painting by Charles Frederick de Brocktorff records the ruins just before the Lieutenant Governor of Gozo had them cleared in 1827, a clearance that threw away the soil and finds without study. Restoration came in the 2000s: lightweight walkways were laid through the temples in 2011 to protect the floors, and a heritage park around them opened in 2013.

Getting there

Ġgantija is in Xagħra on Gozo. Malta International Airport (MLA) is on the main island, about 30 km away in a straight line, so the practical route is by road to Ċirkewwa at Malta's northern tip and then the Gozo Channel roll-on/roll-off ferry to Mġarr harbour on Gozo, a service that runs all day, all year. From Mġarr continue by road to Xagħra, a village that also has the Xagħra Stone Circle and two small caves, Xerri's Grotto and Ninu's Cave.

From the encyclopaedia

Ġgantija is a megalithic temple complex from the Neolithic era, on the Mediterranean island of Gozo in Malta. The Ġgantija temples are the earliest of the Megalithic Temples of Malta and are older than the pyramids of Egypt. Their makers erected the two Ġgantija temples during the Neolithic, which makes these temples more than 5,500 years old and the world's second-oldest existing manmade religious structures after Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey. Together with other similar structures, these have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Megalithic Temples of Malta.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Ġgantija

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia