A couple of weeks ago Franco Mercieca, who steers the tunnel steering committee, told this newspaper that there was nothing whatsoever to discuss about the project. It was now at implementation stage, he said, and we should not waste our breath over a done deal.
As it happens, there is at least one thing left to discuss that the steerer seems to have missed. To learn more about it, I wasted my breath exploring the steep ridge that overlooks Pwales valley – more precisely, the place where Mercieca plans to make his first incision.
I doubt anywhere exists that has a more charming name. The map has it as ‘Għerien Ħida’, but that’s only part of the story. The rest is told by locals, who say that it’s actually ‘Għexet Ħida’, and that the name was originally ‘Għexet Hilda’. It’s said that a queen or princess called Hilda once set up home in a spacious cave along the ridge, possibly to escape her persecutors.
The truth is hardly less poetic. The earliest known documentary evidence is a notarial deed dated 1467 which refers to an inhabited area near Xemxija called ‘hux il chide’. That’s the 15th-century spelling of sorts of ‘għoxx il-ħida’, which simply means ‘kite’s nest’ – a kite being a kind of large bird of prey. I say poetic, because a kite’s nest belongs in ornithological dreamtime. In Malta today, a nesting kite is as much the stuff of myth as a nesting roc, or a refugee princess.
The place shows up again and again in a ream of 16th-century documents. Another notarial deed, this time from 1520, mentions ‘tal ghiren, clausura in contrata ta ximexi’ (‘the caves, a settlement near Xemxija’). It appears that the many caves that dot the ridge were peopled enough to make it to a score of recorded transactions.
Nothing extraordinary there, because Malta has always had its cave dwellers. In his 1536 description, Jean Quintin d’Autun writes that “there are many troglodytes in Malta: they dig caves, and these are their homes”. Probably the best-known site, and the one that seems to have particularly fascinated foreign visitors, was the underground complex at Għar il-Kbir near Buskett. If Gio Francesco Abela got his figures right, 27 families and 117 people in all lived there around 1647.
Many of the caves, and there are at least 12 or 13 of them between L-Imbordin and Manikata, show signs of habitation
Troglodytes are part of history, then, but there are two things that make them equally a valuable part of the present. The first has to do with cave dwelling broadly, and was explored by the film director Pasolini among others.
In Medea (1969), Pasolini contrasts two ways of life: the first, enchanted and steeped in myth and belief, the second more prosaic, rational and ultimately impoverished. Tellingly, the location chosen as a setting for the first was Cappadocia, where people have honeycombed the sculptural rock formations and lived as troglodytes for thousands of years.
There is something primordial and deeply evocative about living in caves. I’m not suggesting we start digging. The point is that cave dwelling is a human experience that has its place in the hearts and minds of people who live in penthouses and maisonettes, just as the sleeping lady of Tarxien might whisper sweet things to a Netflix generation.
The second point has to do specifically with the case at hand. At Għexet Ħida, cave dwelling never quite went away. If it represents an experiment in living, it’s also a living experiment.
Many of the caves, and there are at least 12 or 13 of them between L-Imbordin and Manikata, show signs of habitation. The larger ones, which are walled up, have been used intermittently to keep animals and store fodder. There are rock-cut wells, and little recesses in the walls to store things in. Some of the caves were enlarged by generations of troglodyte baqquniera (a baqqun is a pickaxe).
Perhaps the most unexpected bit is that there are still people living at Għexet Ħida. One or two families live there permanently, in houses that merge into the rock and make surprisingly cosy homes. About six other families, whose local roots go back several generations, continue to use the caves in various other ways.
This, then, is the place that those who think there is nothing to discuss have earmarked as the start of the Malta-Gozo tunnel. Approach roads will have to be built, heavy machinery moved in, and enormous amounts of excavated rock shifted through.
Għexet Ħida faces, if not total obliteration, destruction by creep. No doubt the environment impact reports on the tunnel project will rally masses of technical jargon to recommend that the actual caves be skirted around and ‘preserved’.
They will also be entirely useless, because the whole point of a landscape is integrity and continuity. One of the locals I met showed me the ancient rock-cut steps that lead up to the garrigue (xagħra) and told me how troglodytes would walk down to the chapel of St Anne in Pwales. Għexet Ħida, and the people who inhabit it, are part of a landscape that connects the caves themselves, the agricultural richness of the valley, and the Bajda ridge that overlooks it.
Funny, isn’t it? On the one hand, we’re told that Herculean efforts will be made to inscribe the ġbejna and the ftira – neither of which are in imminent danger of extinction, as far as I can tell – as beacons of world cultural heritage. On the other, the destruction of a precious landscape is dismissed as being beneath discussion.
Kite’s nest it may no longer be, but this one’s positively cuckoo.
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