In-Naxxar - stejjer, grajjiet u laqmijiet
Author: Paul Catania
Book Distributors Limited 2019
416pp
Paul Catania is, we might say, the historian of his home village, Naxxar.
Normally books have at the beginning a list of other books by the same author. We do not have this here, but we get references to previous books by the author sometimes in footnotes and sometimes as a passing reference.
Thus we find he co-edited Naxxar - A village and its people. He also wrote Naxxar: titwiliet fl-istorja (1999), The master blacksmiths of Naxxar, and maybe others.
Thus the information on Naxxar in just this book rather tends to be fragmentary. For instance, the book tells us in detail about the many chapels both in Naxxar and out in Salina but tells us nothing about the history and development of the parish church, except in passing references.
On the other hand, the book is rich in what it does tell us. The author researched not just in the records of the pastoral visits by successive bishops but also in notarial archives and the vast material preserved in the parish's archives including some hand-written diaries found there.
The book is valuable because it gives us, as Professor Frans Ciappara said in the end-note, "history from below" or "grassroots history" in that it speaks of ordinary people who may well be the forefathers of the residents of today's Naxxar.
For a very long time in its history, Naxxar had mostly farmers and herdsmen as its inhabitants, people who nevertheless were so religious they built and enriched all those numerous chapels in the locality.
Then, from the 18th century onwards, rich people started to build their residences in the village and the standard of living rose accordingly as skills were needed to embellish the residences of the rich. Thus, carpenters and skilled iron artisans proliferated.
Catania provides a lot of information about the parish and all its various aspects - as parish priests succeeded each other, undertake new decorations in the church, begin new devotional celebrations, etc. Some things he says reflect a thorough knowledge of many years' standing which is impossible to get from books but can only be found in the collective memory of the parish.
But the crowning glory of this book is Catania's long list of the nicknames of Naxxar. To non-Maltese readers, the nicknames of families and individuals used to be an essential part of the identity of each person. In those days surnames counted for little since many people were illiterate. Hence, the nickname which contextualised the person to a T. This is, I would say, what the Scots mean when they add - son to a surname = son of ...
He has no less than 100+ pages of closely typed lists of nicknames. I looked for the nicknames of my father's family (tan-Nofsinhar) and my mother's (tal-Hamraman) but did not find them since they relate to a different place - Birzebbuga for my father's family and Victoria Gozo for my mother's. That means that the map of nicknames in Malta and Gozo is still an under-researched area.
Finally, the book shows how important that each town or village gets to have its Paul Catania - the individual who can drag to modern knowledge the social history of the town or village and especially the "history from below", the history of our forefathers.