Visiting St. John's Co-Cathedral, The Hypogeum, and The Tarxien Temples

Cal Poly ICEX Group - Jeff Missing

St. John's Co-Cathedral Altar

A side chapel in St. John's Co-Cathedral

After a great week of data acquisition in the Gozo fields, it was time to go some site seeing. Our first visit was to St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valleta. Going into this cathedral was unlike anything I have never seen before. In the seventeenth century, a new Baroque style emerged and the Knights were eager to beat rival churches and make this cathedral more flamboyant than the others. The cathedral went under attack and suffered great damage during the French invasion and the Second World War but with time it has been restored. The upper level of the Cathedral was a museum with amazing historical pieces ranging from art collection by Caravaggio to the gilt bronze monstrance that was intended to hold the relic of John the Baptist Forearm. These pictures can show how flamboyant this style is and how unique and beautiful this Cathedral is. However, no amount of pictures can give justice to how this looks in real life.

Our next stop was to the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground burial site from the prehistoric times. In our Global Engineering site we learned about them and we were all eager to visit the site. The hypogeum was another unique site that cannot be compared to anything else I have ever seen before. We went a few meters underground but the carvings we saw down there looked like if we were inside a building.  The hypogeum consists of three levels and there are different chambers through out.  During the tour we learned about the different chambers and the different hypothesis of the reasoning behind the different sizes and decorations of each chamber. One of these hypothesis consisted that people were buried in different chambers depending on their status. I was very excited to learn that the reason that the hypogeum was found was because some civilians were constructing cisterns for their houses and accidentally found the chambers.

(Courtesy of Google Images): Hypogeum

Heritage Malta is very focused in preserving these chambers and cameras are not allowed but I was able to find an image on Google that showed how much these carvings look like actual temples and not simple under ground carvings.

The Tarxien Temples

 After the hypogeum we still had plenty of sunlight and we decided to go to the Tarxien Temples that were nearby. These temples are also prehistoric and can be connected to the hypogeum because of the many similarities in their architecture and decorations.