For decades they have been abandoned to the mercy of the elements. The lifetime oeuvres of all-but-forgotten Manifki, as Notaries Public were popularly known, living and serving in Gozo dating from the 17th century. I am referring to their acts and registries, that is, their original contracts and testaments, together with their official copies. These precious documents have long been cynically dumped in a humid room, covered with dust. Pigeons were even allowed to nest and urinate on them! Some of them have suffered significant damage, with entire parts beyond repair.
Shame on us for our miserliness and misanthropy! A community which discards its past is a body without a soul; as pathetic and disoriented as an unfortunate patient suffering from dementia. For one of the greatest benefits of studying history is that it allows us a chance to learn about our roots; where we come from; the thoughts of our ancestors; their attitudes and practices; their successes and failures; how we differ from them, and how we are the same. Not only is the past a fascinating study in itself, a voyage down a time-tunnel, it also sheds some light on how best to avoid repeating past mistakes while learning from success stories.
In particular, Notarial Acts are not merely legal documents. They are a record of the man in the street going about his daily business - buying or selling a plot of land; renting a field to grow agricultural produce or to raise animals; endowing his daughter with a dowry; signing a marriage contract; naming his heirs and even catering for his afterlife by bequeathing a pious legacy. They are perfect anthropological material and for a socio-economic analysis of our ancestors whose DNA we have willy-nilly inherited. For Gozo, they have the added significance of identifying - today we would say branding - the cultural heritage of an island region.
According to Paul George Pisani - son of the renowned poet George Pisani, and a Gozitan notary himself - up to the 19th century, notaries had to exercise their profession in an established locality and consequently the acts and wills they drew up almost certainly dealt with people who lived, or related to events that happened, in that particular locality. Pisani also points out that while Notarial Registers in Valletta go back to 1465, those in Victoria, Gozo only start in 1640 with Notary Tommaso Debono, although there were earlier records of Gozitan notaries in the Public Registry of Valletta. Possibly the latter were returned from Constantinople via France after having been transported to Turkey following the 1551 invasion of Gozo.
Last year, the Ministry for Gozo embarked on an ambitious project targeting the restoration of the work of 64 different notaries who practised their profession in Gozo starting from the year 1640. Restoration work began in September last year and so far 122 volumes have been successfully restored. For the current year, my Ministry has allocated €10,000 to enable the continuation of the proper restoration, repair, and binding of notarial volumes and registers. This entails sorting manuscripts that are unshelved, carrying out basic mechanical surface cleaning, identifying bound notarial volumes and manuscript fragments, checking notarial deeds which are in loose-leaf form as well as putting them in chronological order and binding them, labelling and creating protective enclosures; shelving and/or boxing systematically into groups for storage and/or access. A tribute must be paid to John Micallef who is very ably carrying out the restoration work. He owes his knowledge and the need for extreme meticulousness to his long experience as a binder of records of the Gozo Court.
May the ghost of notaries past stop us and future generations of Gozitans from being Scrooges with our hard-earned heritage and enlighten us on the best way forward to forge our future.
Dr Refalo is Minister for Gozo