The events we have seen happening over the past months and (why not?) a sense of national consciousness should shed a very particular light on what we will be celebrating tomorrow.

We are seeing, and we have seen, quite substantial efforts made to downgrade the significance of the 1565 Great Siege in the history of Malta, and of Latin Europe, civilisation and indeed freedom.

As far as I can see, the efforts to water down the significance of 1565 began with the British who used the coincidence of the Italian fleet surrendering on 7 September to get the Maltese to speak of Victories in the plural.

There are other days on which the outcome of World War II is celebrated, such as 7 May. Or we could always remember the last day of air-raids on Malta and celebrate that.

But just as in anything to do with Maltese history, the British were always out to downgrade anything done by the Maltese and especially those done in conjunction with the Order of Malta.

Even the small church in Valletta had a name change and started being called Our Lady of Victories, although it was built especially to celebrate the 1565 victory over the Turks.

We Maltese have always called that church Il-Vitorja as there was only one victory, the 1565 one.

Now under this Presidency, if I remember correctly, the State celebrations that used to be held in St John’s with all the pomp the State can muster, and with the presence of the Knights of Malta, started being celebrated in those parishes (three in Malta and one in Gozo) who celebrate their patron saint’s feast on that day. Last year the celebration was held in Senglea, this year it is being celebrated at Naxxar.

Celebrating the victory that inspired Europe as part of the village feast further downgrades not just the 1565 victory but all that constitutes the Maltese identity. We are living in a time where we dilute our national identity at our risk.

Let us look first at the significance of 1565. It is true the Knights, both in Rhodes and later in Malta carried out widespread attacks on any vessel flying the Turkish insignia. This was why the mighty Turk armada kicked the Order out of Rhodes where it was particularly effective given its proximity to Turkey. Later on in Malta, the Knights continued, even increased, their piratical marauding and this spurred the Turks to attack and take Tripoli out of the Order’s hands and later to attack Gozo and take its inhabitants into slavery.

Then, in 1565, the Sultan wanted not just to even the score for so many captures of vessels, nor just to exact revenge but also and especially to revert the march of history which saw the Christian forces retake the land that until a few years before had been Muslim. In Spain, the last Muslims had been hounded out in 1492. After 1565 the Ottomans never ventured west of Malta, never tried to reconquer Sicily or Spain. The only country which suffered as a direct result of Malta’s defeat was Cyprus which the Turks occupied and invaded a year later.

The fact is the 1565 Great Siege and the later battle of Lepanto put paid to Ottoman ambitions. Together with the defeat at the door of Vienna, Western Europe has been saved for Latin civilisation.

The importance of the 1565 Great Siege has never been understated in the world’s history books, but time has blunted and skewed the way we look at it. Many have been carried away by Gensna’s fatal Mitna ghall-barrani (We died for the foreigners) (although this referred more to World War II). On the contrary, in Malta’s case with reference to 1565, it was more a case of the Knights and the mercenaries they employed, as well as the Piccolo Soccorso and Grande Soccorso who risked, and many times lost their lives to see our forefathers free from Muslim hands. It was more a case of mietu ghalina (they died for us).

Again, history and spin (mainly British spin) have progressively blunted, obscured and twisted the importance of 1565. Granted, the Knights were members of a monastic order who many times did not live up to their oath of office. Granted, the Maltese under the Knights were subjected to a retrograde, obscurantist regime. Granted, power in Malta was shared by a three-some – Order, Bishop, Inquisitor.

But apart from the bastions that cost so much and which were never used, and the fortresses, and the baroque architecture of churches, palaces, village cores, and so on, Malta, after 1565, joined the mainstream of European culture. It was already somewhere there prior to 1530, but then it was perceived as an offshore island belonging to Sicily. It was under the Knights that Malta functioned as a self-sufficient state.

Even in the darkest hours of the Order’s obscurantist rule, the Maltese (well, anyway, those who could read among them) could follow the Enlightenment as it spread around Europe.

Under Napoleon, slavery was abolished, Church and state separated and the British law system of trial by jury was added to the Code Rohan.

This is what we have today. If anything, the recent social advances such as divorce and civil union are right along the line of Western European civilisation. We may have a skewed vision of all this, seeing that we normally view it in terms of religious observance which would see a degeneration where instead there has been progression.

It is precisely this inestimable heritage that is so much at risk today from the resumption of Muslim fundamentalism, ISIS, the Caliphate and the rest of the Horses of the Apocalypse we see galloping around us.

Malta may be an island but it is not cut off from what is happening around it. The living is easy, sybaritic, with students from all over the world making the most of summer and pleasant living, but so was Beirut, in its own way, so was in a different context, Donetsk, so in a way were Tripoli and Benghazi, and so was Sarajevo just a few years ago.

We are not overtly under siege, even though, as I have been saying over the past weeks, the asylum seekers issue is deeply troubling. But we are quickly losing our national identity.

What constitutes our national identity is our language, inimitable and unique. We are not taking adequate steps to safeguard it, not on our national television, nor in the way it is taught, certainly not in the increasingly widespread perception that we can do without it (and then we make little effort to write and speak English correctly).

Apart from the boat people, we have been inundated by people from all around the world. While there is the cosmopolitan environment this brings with it, it also brings a dilution of our national identity and character.

Mainly, however, 1565 saw Malta as the front bastion of Christian Europe facing up to mighty Islam and not succumbing to it. Despite all the concrete evidence all around us, we seem to have forgotten this basic fact.

And when the crunch comes, as it will surely come, it can find us weak and unprepared as we would have succumbed to pleasant living just like the patriarchs and deacons and empress wives and concubines in ninth century Constantinople who suddenly found the Ottomans at the gate. Or like the Greeks in Smyrna in the early 20th century.

There are history lessons all around us, if we care to see.

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