Malta according to Edward Debono (1)

Lateral thinker Edward Debono takes Andrew Spooner of The UK Independent on 'a journey to the birthplace of the civilised world' and tells him that Malta, with which he maintains a strong bond, is like a giant museum:

..To me, Malta is home. I went to school and university there, qualified as a doctor and left for Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. My early years were dominated by the Second World War; we used to have up to 10 air raids a night. At one point, my family, like many on Malta, dug our own air raid shelter in the back garden. For us, it was an amazing experience because it turned into something of an archaeological dig because we discovered the burial chamber of a noble Roman lady, complete with jewels and other artefacts.

That tells you much about Malta: you dig and you find history. The whole island is like a giant museum, filled with remnants of ancient cultures, and its history is complex. We were occupied by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs and the Spanish. Then came the the Knights of Malta who ran the island until the British arrived in the 19th century. It's a long, long history because of our position at the centre of the Mediterranean.

My wartime education was mostly at a boarding school that had to be moved from the often-bombed naval dockyards to the old Arab capital of Mdina. The temporary school we were based at is now a museum attached to a church. Under the school there were air-raid shelters and passages that connected the boys' and girls' schools. I crafted skeleton keys for each interconnecting door. The older boys who wanted to visit the girls were in hock to me and it obviously gave me a lot of power. It's interesting to look back and think of my undiscovered subterranean "tunnel" now becoming part of the history of Mdina.

One thing I didn't realise when I was younger is that Malta is officially the oldest civilisation in the world. Why? Well, the oldest structure in the world is the Ggantija Temple, a substantial Stone Age construction built more than 5,500 years ago on the island of Gozo. "Ggantija" in Maltese means "giant" and the locals called the temple this because they thought only giants could have built it. There are older traces of human activity in the world, such as cave drawings, but a temple signified 10 minutes or so sitting there, absorbing the wisdom of ages.

It is an ancient and very special place. Everyone should travel to Ggantija at least once and spend 10 minutes or so sitting there, absorbing the wisdom of ages. The underground temple of Hypogeum, on the main island, is also astonishing. It was discovered by accident at the beginning of the 20th century by a farmer digging a well. The site is a cavernous structure, with many different parts, including various religious buildings. One of the most interesting features is the "oracle", a giant hole cut into the rock probably about 5,000 years ago.

When a man talks into the hole it reverberates with a powerful echo; when a woman talks into the oracle there isn't any echo. The theory is that it was used to tell when a boy became a man. You can go there now and have a go yourself and apparently it works perfectly. There's even a story that when Margaret Thatcher visited Malta she was taken to the Hypogeum and spoke into the oracle. Everyone stood around waiting expectantly for the echo but it never materialised, "proving" she was a woman...