Stitching up the Knights’ sail-makers’ hall

The Knights of St John, following their departure from Palestine-Syria at the end of the 13th century, became a maritime rather than a land-based force, with their headquarters successively on the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes and finally Malta.

Little remains of the Knights’ maritime heritage in Cyprus or Rhodes today, with the destruction of the Grand Masters’ Palace and the conventual church of St John in Rhodes City in the 1856 earthquake and the destruction of the De Naillac harbour tower by an earthquake in 1863.

With much of the Knights’ maritime heritage in Rhodes lost due to earthquakes and the subsequent destruction caused by the imaginative restorations carried out by the Italians, who occupied Rhodes after World War I, it is evident that the finest examples of the Knights’ remaining maritime heritage are in Malta, concentrated in the Three Cities area and Kalkara.

These include the superb Macina in Senglea with its sheer legs for seating masts into ships and the adjacent long maritime magazines with the names of some of the Knights’ capital ships inscribed on the lintels of the ground floor doors. The third floor was a later addition to these magazines and was used for rope-making and sail-making, hence both its different fenestration – wide windows to admit light to the rope and sail makers – and its fine solid wooden floor.

Today the area on the opposite side of the docks to the Knights magazines in Cospicua is undergoing much needed embellishment, partly financed by the EU, with re-paving and new canalisation, entailing regrettably the recent loss of half the row of characteristic (but not protected as they are not native) ficus trees. At the same time, the ground floor of the magazines opposite, a major surviving element of the Knights’ maritime heritage and which are not any official part of this embellishment project, are being used as garages for the project’s vehicles, and their interior is being ripped out to leave just the façade.

It seems the developers are making ‘facts on the ground’, as in the occupied West Bank of Palestine, without a permit from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority for the destruction of the interior fixtures, fittings and upper floor of the Knights’ magazines ahead of the forthcoming ‘development’ of this heritage building, whether Mepa gives its go-ahead for this ‘development’ or not.

Heritage destroyed without a permit being issued for this destruction.