Cathy Lynn Grossman wrote this special feature (available online only against payment) in 1998 for
USA Today. It describes Malta's temple heritage from a feminine angle:
Malta's feminine mystique - Ancient fertility goddesses attract more visitors to Mediterranean temples
You'd think a goddess could get a little respect. But here, in the prehistoric homeland of Mediterranean fertility goddesses, the earthy idols are dubbed the Fat Ladies. Huge stone gals with global hips wrapped in chisel-pleated skirts were found in the mysterious temple sites dotting Malta and its sister island Gozo. Nearly 6,000 years ago, people on these sunstruck shores, 60 miles south of Sicily, moved megaliths that created temples -- Western civilization's first signs of sacred architecture -- for rituals never to be named or known again. Buried by nature and neglect, the temples were rediscovered in the 1800s.
Now there's a rise in ''idol'' curiosity. Scholars, intellectually driven travelers, new age explorers, even a handful of goddess tour companies, join European sun-seekers here. The tally of American visitors was just 17,000 last year, up 25% from about 14,000 in 1996. They include divers searching for crystalline waters, and history buffs studying the Knights of Malta or the heroic World War II stories of these strategic, embattled isles. Cruise vacationers sail into Valletta's Grand Harbour and take shore tours. Other visitors concentrate on the rich heritage of art, archaeology and architecture left by a succession of colonizers.
Bronze Age warriors supplanted the Temple People, then came the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and the crusading Normans. The Knights of St. John, the medieval order later known as the Knights of
Malta, ruled here from the 16th century until Napoleon arrived in 1798. By 1800, Malta was under British rule until independence in 1964.
Christian pilgrims come here tracking the footsteps of St. Paul, shipwrecked on Malta en route to Rome and martyrdom.''There may be 22 ancient temple sites, but there are 370 Roman Catholic churches,'' says Linda Eneix, founder of the OTS Foundation in Sarasota, Fla. The group develops special-interest tours to Malta with experts from the University of Malta and the National Museum of Archaeology. ''Most people who want to explore the goddess sites don't feel quite right about any 'over-the-moon' stuff,'' Eneix says. ''They're not really comfortable with the touchy-feely new age approach. They want a little more authenticity. ''The security guards at Hagar Qim (ha-DGAR-Eem) and its sister temple, Mnajdra (Im-NIGH-dra), a quarter-mile downhill on a south coast cliff, giggle discreetly about goddess groupies who come at dawn on days such as the summer solstice, when the sun shines through the entry passage to the main altar of Mnajdra. Some meditate, mumble and croon. Some sit silent. Others search for mystic stones, perhaps unaware that several of the statues, carved benches and altars are clever replicas. The real Fat Ladies -- the massive statues and the endearing little figurines like the ''Venus of Malta,'' plump as a bologna sausage with pendulous breasts, or the ''Sleeping Lady,'' dreaming on her stone couch like a fat cat -- ply their charms at the tiny National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.
Still, anyone who devotes a day or two to Malta's pagan past finds ''a magical aura, almost a presence about the temples,'' says Jean Hutchinson, 46, of Charleston, S.C. She visited Malta last March with a group put together by her sister, Ann Waigand, publisher of The Educated Traveler newsletter. ''I like to think it was all very peaceful there when women ruled.''The temples' decorative motifs, chiseled into the soft gray and honey-toned limestone in the temples at Tarxien (TAR-sheen), are dibbled dots and sensuous spirals. The walls curve inward, suggesting once-domed chambers enclosing mysteries. The cloverleaf floor plans suggest the shape of a voluptuous woman. Could it be a fertility goddess for a Neolithic people dependent on the ample gifts of earth and sea? Perhaps.
Maltese guide Mariella Bose wonders if the Temple People were so different. ''In all times people have had love, anger, jealousy and hunger.''Modern humanity reads its own stories into the stones of a pre-narrative society. And the Maltese provide few signs for visitors to tell what little the scholars do know. Only Ggantija (Dg-GANT-ee-a) on Gozo is set up as a landscaped formal archaeological park in the manner that the national authorities someday plan to present other temple sites. One of Malta's most elaborate temples, the Hypogeum (Hy-po-GEE-um), with its underground chambers, is closed to the public while the Maltese try to solve preservation problems at the site. Funds have run out for excavations at other sites such as the Brochtorff Circle on Gozo. The circle, which once yielded a statuette of two Fat Ladies sitting side by side like matrons waiting for a bus, is now in weedy disarray within a homely wire fence behind a house on an unmarked road near Xaghra (SHA-ra).
''When we were kids we played hide-and-seek in places like this,'' Bose says. ''What sites we knew of, the schoolbooks ignored. Today it's different. There is more of an interest. Now my children study Maltese history. ''Gozo, a 20-minute ferry ride across the one-mile channel from Malta, is more agrarian than the densely settled ''big'' island. The entry walk to Ggantija passes farmers' fields so lush and abuzz with hefty honeybees that one wonders if fertility prayers last forever. Archaeologists say Ggantija's stone walls, fitting closely together like jigsaw pieces, have been standing here since 3800 B.C., forming the world's oldest-known free-standing temple. So what happened here -- centuries before Moses, Christ and Buddha -- when, as art historian Veronica Veen writes, ''religiosity revolved around the feminine?''''You have to imagine it yourself,'' Bose says.
