It is not every day that a city celebrates the 125th anniversary of its status as a civitate, a city in the formal sense of the word.  That is what the ancient town of Rabat will be doing today.  It was in fact on the 10th of June 1887 that Queen Victoria, monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India and Governor of the Church of England instituted by her forebear Henry VIII bestowed on the ancient town of Gozo the statue of ‘city’ thus giving the islands its one and only urban centre in the modern sense of the term.

Places around the world carrying the name of the great ‘matriarch of Europe’ who ruled over a far-flung empire on which ‘the sun never sets’ for more than sixty-three years are now in their hundreds.  From Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa to Victoria on the Australian continent, the name of the queen-empress resounds all over the world.  Even in the day and age when empires are only an anachronism, Victoria is a name to be reckoned with.  It is a glorious name for a glorious era now past but whose roots are still to be felt in the present age, whose influence is not a thing of the past but a reality of the here and now.  The Victorian age came and is now history but its impact in Britain and all over is something we still experience and feel today.  Gozo’s one and only town is a proof of this; visitors fall in love with the city of Gozo because it not a big place to go about but big enough not to feel suffocated.  In its few square kilometres it contains all that one would want to have to live an ordinary and comfortable life.  It is place everyone can easily call home!

125 years have passed since Rabat became Victoria.  However the locals will continue to refer to it by its ancient name of Arabic roots; Rabat meaning ‘big’ or ‘central’ is the place to be if you want to have an inkling of what it means to be a Gozitan.  It is the town of De Soldanis, the town of Sir Adrian Dingli, the town of Bishop Pietro Pace, home to Mary Mejlak and Gorg Pisani, birthplace to Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Mercieca, the home of about eight thousand people in the heart of an island envied by most.  I hope that in the future the city of Victoria will continue to cherish the characteristics that make it what it is; a place to visit, a place to fall in love with but last but not least a place which I will always pride myself in calling my town, my city, my home.

Fr. Geoffrey G Attard

Victoria