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If you think Hagar Qim and Mnajdra in Malta were the ultimate, wait until you cross over to Gozo where the oldest standing structure in the world – the Ggantija temples – awaits you. You are bound to wonder how busy and enterprising these Neolithics must have been.
Were they giants? The very Maltese name for the temples, Ggantija (derived from the word Ggant, meaning giant), says it all. Huge rocks cut and hewn into elaborate stone make up the temples, a feat difficult to do even with today’s technology. A civilisation that we may consider as too early for monumental thinking, let alone building, had nonetheless come out of the caves to create these wondrous constructions well before the Egyptians eventually gave us the pyramids.
How did they do it? What means did they use to carry those gigantic stones from the nearby quarries of the village of Xaghra? You will probably have more questions than answers, but it is this enormous gap in our knowledge of that early period in human life and civilisation that fascinates both the visitor and the researcher.
The Ggantija temples stir your senses and provoke awe and wonder, yet they testify to a humanity of early genius and, possibly, a greater material and spiritual awareness than we have hitherto dared attribute to it.
Take your time as you walk from one chamber to another, stop and ponder in front of the sacrificial stone, try and guess how the oracle worked and how these, your own ancestors, lived and loved. It means putting fun into archaeology, finding a sense of being in the very stone that seems to want to tell you a story, but somehow cannot.
In our opinion the Ggantija Temples rank up there with the other marvels of the planet like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. They just don’t enjoy the same marketing…
Obviously for this one you will need to be in Gozo first of all so a quick ferry trip will be in order if you are not going to be based on Malta’s sister island. Once there, you can either follow the signs to Xaghra, if you are in a car, or catch a bus to Victoria and then another – the number 64 or 65 – to Xaghra. Well worth the effort.
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