A racehorse slipped on the tarmac of Republic Street in Victoria on Saturday, 8 August afternoon. It crashed into a hay bale at the finish and fell before hundreds of spectators. Two more horses then stumbled over the fallen animal as they charged uphill towards the line. The organisers called the fall a normal accident and insisted the horse walked away unhurt. Activist Romina Frendo called the races state-sanctioned abusive entertainment and demanded their outright abolition. Gozo's real tradition is a complex issue between those two viewpoints.
Michael Caruana, the Leone Band Club President who has coordinated the races for 36 years, traces them back 550 years. He says the Knights of St John picked their best horses and raced them on 15 August. History substantiates more of his assertion than his detractors would prefer. Medieval Gozitans raced horses to keep the cavalrymen of the Dejma, the local militia, battle-ready. Republic Street, itself once carried the name Racecourse Street, a clue accounted for in the map. The Knights took racing seriously enough to build a viewing loggia at Saqqajja Hill (limits of Rabat, Malta) in 1696. Victoria kept its own Loggia tal Palju at the top of Republic Street, built in 1733. The stone balcony still overlooks the finish line where Saturday's horses fell. Grandmasters watched the Mnarja races and awarded brocaded banners, the palji, to the winners. Winners then donated those banners to their village churches, where they served as altar cloths. Thousands still cross on the ferry from Malta each August to line the Victoria pavements. Feast-day racing has deep and verifiable roots in these islands.
Still, retaining a name does not ensure a practice continues. The knights' horses ran on beaten earth, not on tarmac that road builders laid for rubber tyres. As Saturday's footage showed, tarmac provides shod hooves with very little traction. August temperatures now routinely approach 35° Celsius, heat that Frendo argues no racing horse tolerates. According to a vet and an equine expert speaking to Times of Malta, horses occasionally escape harm after a fall. They mentioned that intense racing can increase the likelihood of injury, much like intense physical activity does for humans. Towns elsewhere that keep street races prepare the ground for their horses before every event. Siena (Italy) spreads a thick layer of volcanic earth across its piazza for each Palio. Victoria changes nothing about its streets except to stack hay bales at the finish line. Those bales arrived only four years ago, a tacit admission that the course stops nothing.
The tradition argument also trips over the calendar. Victoria stages street races twice each summer, for St George's feast in July and Santa Marija in August. The National Archives holds colonial-era permits linking street races to St George's feast as well. So the ritual celebrates parish rivalry and spectacle at least as much as any Marian devotion. Frendo asks what Santa Marija has to do with horses, and the honest answer is little. Tradition here names the habit of racing, not any fixed date, route, or sacred meaning.
Consider, then, what the islands inherited from the Knights and what they secretly dropped. Festa culture took its recognisable modern form under Grand Master De Rohan in the late 1700s. Carnival arrived in 1535, when knights staged pageants and tournaments in Birgu (Vittoriosa, Malta) before Lent. The Parata sword dance once mattered so much that people said no Parata meant no Carnival. Today, children perform it, a shadow of the mock battle the Grand Master once sanctioned. Grandmaster Zondadari introduced the Kukkanja greasy pole in 1721 as a carnival spectacle. That game died when the Knights left, then flickered back through the twentieth century. Lascaris restricted carnival masks in 1639 when he judged the celebrations had run out of hand. The Dejma militia that the races once trained disappeared with no one mourning its passing. Traditions have historically changed, disappeared, and reappeared as circumstances developed.
The feasts themselves illustrate how far practice has drifted from the inherited form. UNESCO listed the Maltese festa in 2023 as intangible cultural heritage worth safeguarding. However, many outdoor festivities currently depend on drinking, loudness, and at times, complete chaos. Today's village squares host all-night parties fuelled by cheap alcohol, a stark contrast to the processions they once held. Those who protect tradition cannot insist on its purity when society is changing.
Gozo has also proved ruthless about heritage whenever development promised money. Its own Regional Development Strategy warns that the building boom will alter traditional townscapes. The document complains about towering skylines and the diminishing space between Gozitan villages. The Gozo Tourism Association complains that overdevelopment now jeopardises the island's core distinctiveness. Villages with stone houses, watched over by cranes, possess an ancient heritage surpassing that of any race. An island trading its skyline for apartments cannot then declare one afternoon of racing untouchable. Gozo invokes tradition selectively, defending the spectacle while permitting bulldozers among the older stones.
The safety record deserves more scrutiny than the annual outrage cycle ever provides. In 2018, a horse bolted into the Victoria crowd after a handler whipped it. A court later found its owner guilty of cruelty and of injuring three bystanders. In 2023, a racing horse knocked down an elderly woman on a pedestrian crossing. A jockey suffered a fractured foot after a fall on Saturday, and some animals were reportedly equipped with electric-shock devices, according to witnesses. Equestri Malta, the sport's regulator, issues no permits for races outside venues it recognises. The event therefore runs beyond the reach of the body certifying equine safety everywhere else. One detail stands out: national anger erupted only when cameras caught a horse falling. In prior years, injured spectators received less media attention and did not trigger any government inquiry.
None of this obliges Gozo to abolish the races; it obliges Gozo to become honest. A tradition worth keeping deserves conditions its founders would recognise, starting with the racing surface. Racing on a proper earthen surface, at cooler hours, under independent veterinary control would honour them. Frendo herself concedes the races might continue if independent equine experts certify them safe. Caruana's vets and hay bales already admit the principle that the past needs amendment. The question is why the amendment stops right where inconvenience and expense begin. Each year, Siena restores its piazza, demonstrating that communities can fund their traditions. Funding the remedy is as possible as tradition justifying the risk. Otherwise, the races honour habit rather than heritage, and habit slips easily on tarmac.