Go to Gozo, Not Just for The Euphony of its Name

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Parent Category: Travel Info

Category: Travel Feature

Published on Sunday, 22 August 2010 18:07

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

It's not much to look at on the map, a smudge about a fourth of the size of the not-over-impressive island-state of Malta, midway in the Mediterranean Sea between the Atlantic Ocean and the Middle East, between Europe's drawers and Africa's haircut.
 
But the island of Gozo is a land distant from its downwind neighbors -- with not an Islamic veil anywhere. It abounds with genial British customs, despite the dazzling strangeness of the Latinate spellings of its clearly Semitic-sounding Maltese place names and words.

Some include: Zejtun (from the Hebrew, some-think-Arabic zeyit, olive). Shemeshia (obvious to a first-grade Hebrew speaker, to the sun, shemesh). San Lawrenz. Zebbug. Xewkija. Mgarr. Victoria/Rabat, a dual name for a mixed history and schizophrenic decision point. 

The carved stone ''azure window'' sentinel at the inland sea of windswept Dweirja Bay. Neolithic cave dwellings and mystery leavings near Kercem. Prehistoric temples probably older than any standing structures anywhere on the globe. Burial mounds, cart ruts and dolmen at Ta' Cenc.
 
Three islands large in history of conquest and reconquest... an even smaller smidge in the Mediterranean called Comino, chummily parenthesized by larger Gozo on the Northwest, and big, big sis Malta to the Southeast.
 
But it's a lush, green island, thanks to the blue clay that sponges in the water and yields it back slowly.

 It's an island with as rich a tapestry of history as its big sister, Malta, a little over a half-hour by massive ferry away. It offers cathedrals ornate beyond your expectations, immaculate streets swept absolutely clean by wind and insinuating rains with not a trace of cardboard or rubbish or littering anywhere.

And it has a UNESCO world heritage site that embarrasses the student of history for not knowing these temples in near-pristine deshabille containing hints of a tribal and community worship from as long ago as 1,000 years before Stonehenge, 2,500 years before the Sphinx and the Pyramids. And you thought Israel was the bee's knees for archeology?
 
Not a whole lot is known specifically about the particulars, but here are clover-leaf form temples, side by side, that hint at fertility and fecundity issues, that show evidences of some type of rituals, ash burial 1,000 years after the first temple had been abandoned, side by side 20 meters from the second. Figurines with amplitudes of breasts, hips and legs, without heads, but with fashionable pleats on a skirt-like garment above zaftig balloony legs tell some marvelous story that still awaits the devices of the future to connect and narrate into some cohesive whole.
 
Fishing villages absent any attitude, blessedly no kiosks or peddlers pestering the hiker intent on history or romantic panoramic sweeps of majesty. No bother at all, unlike the souks of the countries just a plane hop to the south. From today's local daily Times, there is a headline blazoning that trucks are destroying Gozo, with as many as 20 per hour trundling noisily across the fair isle, imagine. A whole 20 trucks per hour destroying the peace and tranquility.
 
No Jews, apparently, live on Gozo: We asked many times. Of churches and Christian signs, there are many, but no synagogues, no ancient ruins of synagogues, no preparations for bar mitzvahs or circumcision celebrations. Perhaps I did not ask the right people. It has been a truism that almost every civilization has its [infinitesimal] percentage of Jews, clinging to the barnacled underside, quietly going about its tiptoeing life.

But no, I am informed with asperity--none here. After the endless skeins of mosques in North Africa jutting up with their now-automated muezzins from the endless march of serried, militant olive tree fields, also a piquant absence of mosques, too. The Knights of Malta, the Knights of St. John, literally held the fort here against the onrushing historic map-drench of Islam.
 
Grottoes. Ravines. Dizzying island clefts that are evidences of the tectonic plates mashing imperceptibly between the African plate and the Atlantic plate. Three millimeters per year is added to one side, and 3 subtracted or subsumed, from the other. Plants hanging onto the sides of ravishing ochre cliffs a green surprise: Here are not just rockface hangers-on, but capers we might, if we harvest carefully, eat with our breakfasts or relish with our entree.

White-caps smacking the rocky shores, eroded stone fields to clamber over and marvel at--how the whorls of nature surprise; how the wind and rain pummel the shapes into an endless ongoing fascination. Hills and verdant dales. Tiny narrow winding streets in ochre and sandstone, from the high airplane air, appearing a chunky melange of beige and ecru pudding--until one lights on the island and sees first-hand how gorgeous, how variegated, how homogeneous with differences this gem-like spit of land in the cerulean and turquoise ocean is.

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