The very popular bay of Marsalforn in the north of Gozo was also known as Il-Qala ta’ Marsalforn (Marsalforn Creek), Il-Qala ta’ San Pawl (St Paul’s Creek), and Il-Bajja ta’ Marsalforn (Marsalforn Bay). Tradition also associates it with St Paul’s stay in the Maltese Islands.
Joe Zammit Ciantar writes
This harbour has been used for anchorage since antiquity; it is the first harbour seen by sea craft approaching the islands from the north.
The name features in a notarial deed as early as 1486. It is a composite name, made up of Semitic ‘marsa’ (place good for anchorage) and Romance ‘forn’, apparently immediately derived from Italian forno, which today means ‘oven / bakery’.
Childhood memoirs
This was the bay my family used to go to for swimming in my childhood days.
I was brought up in Rabat – we Gozitans rarely, if ever, refer to Gozo’s capital by the legal name ‘Victoria’, which officially replaced ‘Rabat’ in 1887, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of England’s Queen Victoria – in the middle of the island. My family had no summer residence by the seaside so I became acquainted with the bay as I grew up.
When still a child my mother used to take us five children by bus to this bay. Our father was always at work at the Magna tad-Dawl (‘Electricity Machine’, the name used by Gozitans for a small power station) in Rabat, or at home repairing a clock, a radio, or just doing something else. I never remember him ever coming with us to the seaside when we were young. We used to go in the afternoon, taking with us the usual towels and bathing costumes, a qoffa (‘wicker basket’) filled with slices of Maltese bread, some tomatoes, oil, and capers, because ‘il-baħar jiftaħlek l-aptit’ (the sea air sharpens the appetite) and ‘it-tfal dejjem bil-ġu[’ (children are always hungry). Her favourite place –both for its seclusion and safe shallow waters – was the pebbly beach just beyond Il-Menqa, on the side of Ghar Qawqla, beneath the heights on the right-hand side of the bay. There we used to spend hours swimming and playing with anything in the water, until il-mà (‘mother’) would start calling us, one by one, to change into our clothes and return home by the last bus to Rabat at 6 or perhaps 7pm.
I remember I had a small pen-knife with which I used to pick tasty imħar (limpets) and I still curse the day I lost it among the pebbles that still abound in that area.
In those days, for me Marsalforn was a large open bay where people who could swim well even dared do so in deep waters.
Camping with fellow scouts
When I was 11, I was enrolled with the Salesian Boy Scouts’ Group in Victoria. I used to enjoy the week-long camps the group used to organise, one of which was annually held in a secluded stretch of field in Il-Qbajjar (literally The Small Tomb), a bay situated on the west of Marsalforn – today a built-up area. There we enjoyed ourselves in a professionally organized and disciplined programme of activities that included regular swimming sessions, adventurous night-hikes, and a last-night singalong and bonfire. I used to enjoy participating in every activity. However, I could not stand those among us who used to bully timid boys like me. I simply hated being challenged to ‘risk’. I was always cautious, and never remember having ever made a step in the dark.
Thanks to those night-hikes and other camp activities, I started discovering Marsalforn little by little; the bay began to grow smaller although I used to wonder what stamina those elder scouts in the group had to dare swim across Marsalforn bay, and return safely to where most of us stayed playing with a ball, or just playing around.
Il-Blokki (The Blocks made of stone blocks and concrete) once placed in the sea on the front of the bay to break the large waves that the winter northerly winds and storms occasionally bring in and damage the apertures and façades of the houses across the street, are today buried under the much appreciated promenade built several years ago. In my early youth, besides near L-Ispringbord (The Springboard) on the left-hand side of the bay, they were other places where I used to go and join friends for a swim.
Strolling on the front
During my years in the Gozo Lyceum (1954-9) I befriended classmate George Attard (today a medical doctor), the son of the then Commissioner for Gozo. We used to spend a lot of our summer holidays together and often went down to Marsalforn by the 6pm bus and walked all the way back to Rabat late, after 10pm. During our leisurely walks in the bay – which was not lit up like it is today – I started appreciating the lazy life people living in Marsalforn enjoyed, killing the time chatting, strolling, playing cards, and sitting on door-steps, until sleep won over the humid hot salty and sticky atmosphere, and slowly the bay gained its quiet merited slumber, too. When his family moved back to Malta because his father’s term as Commissioner for Gozo came to an end, I hardly ever went to Marsalforn. It could have been because I had then started another life of my own, as well.
In those days I used to wonder who the people staying in Marsalforn really were! My father used to pay rent for the house we had in Rabat! Some of these people had a house in Rabat and another in Marsalforn too! When I grow up and have a job, unless I emigrate to Australia as some of my schoolmates in the primary classes did, I will try to have a house of my own in this bay – that is what I promised myself in those days.
Who cares to go to Marsalforn?
After my ‘O’ levels, I got my first job: that of an emergency teacher. Then my dreams started to take other shapes. One of these was to go on holiday abroad. And apart from giving my share with the newly formed Victoria Scout Group (July 1963), I started planning long-coveted holidays, one of them a working holiday in London. Marsalforn and the dream of having a summer residence there was shelved, if not completely forgotten, when I met a girl from Ħamrun (in Malta), and started seriously planning to build a house, start a family, and settle in Santa Luċija, in Malta.
Family camping at Il-Qbajjar
It was in the seventies, when I had a family and two children, that Il-Qbajjar started becoming the place where in summer we used to hold barbecues, together with my parents and other family members, while our children enjoyed the marvellous clean sea of that small circular bay. Later on I bought an all weather six-sleeper tent and, together with my wife and children used to camp for a whole month on the land – today densely built – between Il-Qbajjar and Ix-Xwejni (diminutive of xini, ‘galley’, hence ‘The Small Galley’). The Franciscan Sisters in their convent across the road, besides having daily Mass, used to be so kind and helpful to us in all kinds of ways, especially by providing us with water. During those family-camping holidays I started rod-fishing and recall the night when I caught my first large sargu (White bream) and a fisherman in the area stated on that day that he could never believe such fish could be found in the low waters of that area.
A landing on Il-Qolla l-Bajda
The first time we camped there was in the mid-seventies. In 1978, when my wife was five or six months pregnant with our third child (Kristoff), we were camping there, when we heard a helicopter approaching. It was flying so low that we could hear laughter, and see the people on it quite distinctively. The helicopter kept flying and circling around us. All of a sudden it slowed down and started hovering above Il-Qolla l-Bajda (The White Pitcher), some metres to the left of our camp. Then, slowly, it started landing on the flat round top of the white hillock until … as soon as it touched the ground, a large chunk of rock from one side on the south gave way under one of the resting arms and the helicopter’s weight. The helicopter leaned to one side, as if it were falling after the rock. Those onboard gave a loud frightened scream, and … the pilot briskly flew up and away at speed. The following day a friend of mine told me ‘those people’ were sent to check what was happening in the area because the land was being earmarked for commercial development. The man leading our country in those days was against this development, he said. But eventually the speculators’ ‘dreams’ overruled the love of whoever was in favour of preserving the natural habitat there.
Il-Qolla l-Bajda, which today still shows the wound it had sustained on that occasion, stands on a small promontory of land, just above a large natural cave, dug out or rather eroded by time, weather, and the rough seas beating on it since time immemorial. The hillock, called ‘white’ because of its particular soft, rather greyish white rock, overlooks the small bay of Ix-Xwejni on the other side of which lies a complex of saltpans. From a study of the place names of the coast of Gozo, which I eventually published in book form in 2000, I am certain these saltpans belonged to Gozitan scholar Gio Pietro Francesco Agius Sultana, better known as De Soldanis, author of the first ever published grammar of the Maltese language, an unpublished four-volume Maltese-Italian dictionary, and an unpublished history of Gozo. In front of the saltpans, across the road, there is an as yet unidentified rock-cut cave that belonged to him, too.
Marsalforn today
Marsalforn has become the most popular summer resort and holiday beach frequented by many Gozitans, Maltese, and foreigners.
During the winter months both houses and bay are almost empty. Only a few fishermen animate the place. During the day it is regularly visited by tourists who take every opportunity to enjoy both the scenery and fresh air, and bask in the mild sunny weather the Mediterranean climate blesses us with. It is on weekends accompanied by fine weather that life changes a little, thanks to the efficient ferry service provided by Gozo Channel.
In late June, early July, however, when schoolchildren have finished their end-of-year exams, Gozitan families who own a summer residence in Marsalforn, jinħlu (go down) for the months of July and August, while some linger on until the schools reopen. Many people from the sister island who today own a flat within the limits of this bay come over here with family, pet, and car, and join the mixed crowd of men, women, and children who, in the evenings walk, or sit, talking about anything, or fill the various restaurants that have been established along the years on the waterfront, and in Il-Menqa.
And life goes on so long as one’s health permits, as long as pockets can afford, until come September Marsalforn starts to hibernate with new memories that outnumber the pebbles it has on its beaches.
Today I can join in and enjoy this life with my wife and family, and friends too, staying in a small flat my parents built for us, their four children.
A lot to tell
Marsalforn has a lot of stories to tell. Since the olden days it must have been the harbour where Roman ships coming from Sicily and Italy, could have anchored. Marauding corsairs from their dens on the Mediterranean coast must have surely made a haven-port out of it.
A legend recounts that the word ‘forn’ in Marsalforn is reminiscent of ‘… a bakery where several young women used to work preparing the dough to be baked into bread.’ It is said that one day corsairs landed in the bay, came ashore and approached the bakery. When they threatened to assault the young women, the women started throwing fresh dough at their faces, blinding them for some time. The corsairs were thrown into confusion, giving the women enough time to escape being abused or, worse, taken into slavery.’
Another ‘popular etymology’ infers that the harbour is so called because of the presence of a large cave, in the shape of an oven, found in the vicinity, on the coastline, to the left of the bay. As a matter of fact this cave is still referred to as Il-Forna. However, in this case, the word ‘forn’ does not have anything to do with ‘oven / bakery’. We may compare its occurrence in Il-Forna, Il-Ponta ta’ Forna, and Forna Point – names associated with the same cave on the north-western coast of Marsalforn – in Kalafrana (made up of ‘cala’ + ‘frana’, in Malta), and in California (also made up of ‘cala’+‘fornia’, in the United States of America), too. The word ‘forn’ has been interpreted having a very remote Latin origin and infers ‘port’, as it precisely suits Marsalforn, and all the other names with ‘forn’ as a composite part thereof. Il-Forna, however, is definitely not the name of neither a port, nor a creek … it refers to a cave. The word has also been interpreted as a possible corruption of Latin Liburna (a ship) ‘… le nom d’un bateau que les Liburni, peoplade illyrienne, utilisaient.’
I have recently come across the Portuguese ‘furna’ which stands for ‘cave; cavern; den; grotto’. I have also found the names Estrada Furna and Porto de Furna for a street and a small harbour, both located near the town of Vigo, on the north-western coast of Spain, just above the border with Portugal.
Marsalforn must have gained its name from that prominent deep sea cave, still called Il-Forna, and infers ‘the harbour near the cave’.
Marsalforn is today an important name, forming part of our Semitic toponymic stock, quite distinct and meaningful as part of our vocabulary, very popular with both Gozitans and Maltese, and surely associated with nostalgic memories for the foreign tourists who, during their short stay with us enjoy the charm and beauty the bay provides every moment of the day, even in winter.
Għar Qawqla
Marsalforn once embraced a quite uncommon sight: Għar Qawqla, a cave, or rather an opening in a large rock, part of a small promontory jutting out into the sea, on the far right-hand side of the bay. Rough seas used to provide spectacular and breathtaking scenes of waves crashing violently against the rock itself, and splashing with force through the ‘cave’. But, unfortunately, these same rough seas have over time broken up the rock and destroyed the cave, leaving behind only a small part of it and, fortunately this time, its name has been registered as that denoting the land in the vicinity. Today many try to interpret the meaning of ‘Qawqla’. A friend of mine, who is an expert in Arabic, has even suggested an affinity with the name of a bird. But who really cares for the meaning? The name is definitely of Semitic origin. But above all, like our Semitic vocabulary, its pronunciation is musical, fascinating, and almost spiritual. The name is surely unique.
Other hillocks
In the limits of Marsalforn there are two other hillocks. One of them is Il-Qolla s-Safra (The Yellow Pitcher), sister to Il-Qolla l-Bajda and, according to De Soldanis, to another long non-existent Il-Qolla l-Ħamra (The Red Pitcher). Its lower golden yellow downs are being encroached by high blocks of flats, which today obstruct the otherwise enchanting scenery it used to provide.
The other is Il-Merżuq (‘The Jet of Water’ or ‘The Ray of Light’). It is a mysterious small hill with a dark-grey solid mound of rock on top of it. Other names with which it is also known are Il-Munġbell (a mimated Semitic noun made up of ‘m’ + ‘ġebel’ which originally rendered the sense of ‘heights’). This last name is traditionally interpreted as ‘The Volcano’, “because the hill was once a living volcano, and today you can still pick the black lava-like rock from its top,’ is the folk interpretation. [A reminder of this name is that of a street in the bay: Triq il-Munġbell.] It is also known by Is-Salvatur (‘The Saviour’), a name it acquired after a wooden cross was erected on top of it, a long time ago. From what I have learnt, the cross used to serve as a spiritual inspiration and heavenly refuge to fishermen going out to sea, or coming in with their catches. A large statue of a Christ with open arms – reminiscent of that atop the 2400 ft. high Corcovado Mountain, in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil – today stands in its place, dominating the surroundings. However, this faces Rabat, with its back to Marsalforn. I believe that whoever placed the statue there gave little thought to our forefathers’ firm roots in the faith we embrace. His (or their) thoughts were focused more on putting up a dominating Christ to be enjoyed by all coming down Rabat Road on their way to this bay, rather than by fishermen and boatmen approaching the bay from the open seas.
Il-Menqa
The occurrence of the word menqa is not limited to Marsalforn only. It stands also for inlets in Marsa, Msida, and San Pawl il-Ba[ar (all in Malta), and with time, it must have acquired the semantic value of a ‘sheltered enclosure for anchoring boats’. In fact, our Il-Menqa is a small enclosure where small dgħajsas and luzzus anchor at sea, or rest on dry land, sheltered from sea-storms, especially in the winter months. Because it is at the far end, on the right-hand side of the bay, and ever since several remissi (‘garages’) underneath dominating Calypso Hotel, have been refurbished as restaurants, many people have the opportunity to admire our people’s ability in building, painting, and decorating their ‘eyed’ fishing boats which provide a colourful scenario against the emerald blue sea, the honey coloured Maltese stone, and the buildings surrounding Il-Qolla s-Safra and the blu sky, in the distant background on the left.
St Paul’s Church
The origins of the small church dedicated to St Paul’s Shipwreck, standing half way up the road leading to Għar Qawqla on the left, and to the village of Xagħra on the right, are very old. A picture taken by R. Ellis of Valletta immortalizes the chapel, still in its original splendour, standing almost by itself on barren land, dominating the bay, more than a century ago. Today, its very old walls, which have worn away with age and the salty sea air even on the inside, have been covered by hard enduring cement. Some alterations in the structure were recently made to provide more space for the ever-growing summer congregation.
This is the church that offers the religious services the people share within it, with God, with Our Lady of Sorrows, and today with Dun Mikiel, the recently established rector of the church.
Like his predecessor Fr Marjanu, Dun Mikiel is an energetic Gozitan priest, endowed with great fervour for both his parish and summer residents. He is always ready to have enough Masses said for the convenience of one and all of his parishioners and visitors. He is very sensitive about the restricted space and uncomfortable summer temperatures for the congregation that gathers within the Lord’s house. He is keen and enthusiastic on providing ‘educational entertainment’ to children and youths during the lazy hours of the day. Like Dun Marjanu, he definitely makes himself understood to both children and adults when offering spiritual guidance, assertive in both tone and pitch when delivering his weekend homilies.
Dun Mikiel is very conscious of the needs of the people who frequent his church. And … on their part, the people participate and donate willingly to its upkeep, even though the raison d’être of their summer presence there is to enjoy a healthy, pleasant and restful holiday in immortal, simply beautiful Marsalforn.