An architect friend of mine told me the other day that he found it interesting that the harbour fortifications are set to look uniform for the first time in their history. There is some truth to that in that the massive restoration programme currently in full swing will render the walls a continuous pale honey colour. Quite as if they were built in a day’s work the other week.
The harbour fortifications may soon be a uniform colour. But without the circuses and shady characters and stories they’d be, I dare say, quite colourless- Mark Anthony Falzon
Restoration being a technical field (though never too distant from the politics of value and authenticity), I should rather leave it to the experts to decide what’s best for our walls. In any case my interest lies elsewhere, namely in the eviction of all sorts of ‘squatters’ and ‘encroachments’ as part of the restoration push.
My daily walk along the perimeter of Vittoriosa takes me past three or four car parks, a boċċi club, a regatta boathouse, a citrus orchard and farmyard of sorts nestled deep inside the Post of Castile, one ortwo disused bird trapping sites(imnasab), and a row of colourful huts known as kaxxi and used by fishermen to store tackle, nets and such.
Nothing odd about that. In fact I’ve always known the swar (walls) of Valletta, Floriana, and the three cities as something of a circus of humanity merrily at play among and fairly oblivious to the monumental architecture. The closest I’ve seen is Rudolf von Alt’s watercolour in the Liechtenstein Museum which shows a bustling and plebeian fishmarket right in the middle of a marvellous set of classical ruins in Rome.
In our case there’s a more colourful side than selling fish. Valletta’s swar as I remember them were home to all sorts of shady and sometimes downright illicit activities. The rock-cut wartime shelters often contained vicious fighting dogs and at one point a fully grown tiger which word had it had been bought as a cub from avisiting circus.
The alveolar and angular wallscape served up a great many blind spots and lent itself. There were rumours of gambling dens hidden deep inside the rock and of squatters living in some god-forsaken recess. The pine and olive groves on the glacis were known to be a magnet for sexual liaisons, voyeurs, and gay cruising.
Thing is, I find this all rather endearing. I would like to suggest that our swar were and to some extent still are the site of a specific type of urban culture that’s miles apart and yet intimately connected to the more strait-laced version located a few minutes’ walk away in the town centres.
The harbour fortifications provided a safe haven for all sortsof marginal and sometimessubversive practices that found themselves pushed towards the edges, physically as well as metaphorically.
All of which is a far cry from the original purpose. The walls of the harbour towns were originally built for two reasons. The first was obviously defence. What’s left of them reminds us that, as Martha Pollak puts it, “since war in the early modern period was primarily carried out through siege, the city became the privileged site of war.” The bastions were built primarily as war machines.
The second purpose was to display and affirm the power of the sovereign and state (in our case the Knights). From the Renaissance onwards walls became a symbol of political functionality and their upkeep one of good governance. It is not incidental that walled city and siege views especially became a staple of decorative art.
What happened was that the original logic and rhetoric of war gradually gave way to more mundane ideas. I suppose at some point the garrison got fed up waiting for an enemy which never came. In this sense the sea proved our homegrown tartar desert. In any case the scene was set for a siege from within.
There is nothing recent about the ‘misuse’ of fortifications. In one of his many magnificent books Stephen C. Spiteri tells how people living in the harbour cities historically used the fortifications as a communal dump, tipping their rubbish right into the ditches.
In Senglea, the fishermen who draped their wet and salt-ladennets over the walls to dry did their bit for the deterioration of the parapets. Herdsmen were also wontto bring animals to graze and so forth around the city walls, to the extent that the Knights often had to issue orders to prevent them from doing so.
The intriguing thing is that in many cases it was the Knights themselves who licensed what we would today call the change of use. Increasingly, they leased out sections of the walls for various purposes, including agriculture and even the building of tenements.
As Spiteri puts it, “as early as the mid-17th century many areas of the fortifications were actually serving more horticultural than defensive purposes”.
These then were the roots of today’s squatters and encroachments. The war machines became machines for living for all sorts of people, most of whom didn’t have chivalry on their mind.
Not that the images of war are entirely gone. Every summer morning when I was a child, my grandmother would lead us down what she called ‘il-mina’, a tunnel (possibly a sally port) that cut right through the San Salvatore bastion down to the popular swimming spot known by Valletta people as ‘il-banjijiet’ (‘the baths’).
There was something rather charmed about our daily commute through the bowels of the city walls. It was easy to conjure up childhood images of secret passages (we were also reading Enid Blyton at the time, which helped), of Turks slipping into Valletta by the back door, and of treasure buried by the Knights.
Above all, there was a distinct whiff of ritual siege about it. We might not have put it that way at the time but my grandmother’s chosen route smacked of the mock siege battles that were so popular in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Most ways of entering a walled city do so. I’d like to think, for example, that the Barrakka lift mimics a siege tower.
I somewhat share my architect friend’s concern. Restoration is fine but it wouldn’t do to strip the walls of their mundane history and to ‘elevate’ them to some abstract notion of heritage. They may soon be a uniform colour but without the circuses and shady characters and stories they’d be, I dare say, quite colourless.
mafalzon@hotmail.com