The Fat Lady of Malta

It is nice to hear again from Boston writer Lori Hein. She has written a delightful post about her visit to the temples and the archeology museum during her Malta trip. From Ribbons of Highway -Thanks Lori for the kind mention!:

We pulled into the small dirt parking lot that sits near Malta’s Neolithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra and handed our money to a man who looked like Popeye. His face was grizzled by sun and sea spray, his teeth were several short of a full set, and his sailor cap sat high and to one side, calling attention to his large walnut forehead. He was delighted to see the kids, and he dug around in the pockets of his baggy pants and produced two fistfuls of hard candy, which Adam and Dana sucked on while listening to his tales of the mystical structures we were about to visit. Before we headed off to the temples, he promised to personally guard our car and pointed us to the free toilets. “Don’t use the toilets in the Hagar Qim Restaurant. You have to pay fifty cents each.”..

The island nation of Malta is peppered with spectacular megalithic temples erected by the ancients to venerate their goddess of fertility, and some of the complexes are, themselves, shaped like robust, pregnant women. “This room is the belly,” I said to the kids as we explored Ggantija, Gozo's "place of giants.” (They didn’t say “yuck.” My kids are cool.) The people who built these temples also carved statues and statuettes of healthy, round women, and seven of them, including the famous (and tiny – just a few centimeters high) “Venus of Malta,” were found at Hagar Qim, which means “standing stones” in Maltese (Malti).

The statues and figurines are poignantly beautiful and simple. Like the Maltese landscape, stark and unadorned. Unearthed from their temple homes, most of the statues of ancient Malta’s “fat lady culture” now rest in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta’s capital and a World Heritage Site. The museum, which boasts a vivid central ceiling fresco, was built in 1571 as an auberge for the Knights of Malta. As you make your way through the building to view the exquisite fat ladies, you can walk atop sections of floor that have been peeled back and replaced with Plexiglas to afford views onto stone steps and vaulted chambers that run below street level...