In the second half of January 1990, when the interest of foreign journalists visiting Romania had broadened to include areas other than politics following the fall of the Communist dictatorship, I spoke to three journalists about the state of the Church, one of whom was Maltese. Thanks to him, two months later I received an invitation to a seminar organised by the Academy of Studies of Malta’s ruling party (AZAD), entitled ‘Voices from the East’, which was to be attended by two Polish politicians, one Hungarian and myself, who was more of a private individual.
It was my first trip to the West, so, having made my way through the crowds at Otopeni on the morning of 4 April 1990, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the aeroplane on which I was to fly to Rome was a Soviet IL-18. Nor was the realisation that it would be stopping over in Tirana particularly welcome, as Albania was still under Communist rule, having declared itself the world’s first atheist state, and I could not forget that in the 1970s I had read in a foreign newspaper that a priest had been sentenced to death and executed for baptising a child. As the plane came in to land, I saw bunkers and machine-gun nests at the edge of the runway. The Albanian airport building resembled the grocery shop in Babadag, except that there were two scrawny palm trees in front of the entrance. A few passengers got off at Tirana, after which several soldiers burst onto the plane, dressed in uniforms identical to those worn by soldiers in Chinese films. They wanted to check whether any Albanians had been left behind on the plane and were trying to get to Italy that way.
Although I’d missed the Air Malta flight I’d booked, I was put on a Boeing 737 in Rome with German tourists – a charter flight – as there was enormous goodwill towards Romanians and Romania three months after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime. From the airport, where I was met, I was taken to the ‘Dragonara’ hotel, and in the evening to a reception with the other three guests at an official government building, where a superb crucifix hung on the wall, next to which we had our photograph taken. Malta, as was evident at every turn, was a country with a deep faith in God. After the seminar ended, I stayed on the island for another week, and I remember that in one of the homes where I was invited, I saw an icon that was as Orthodox as could be. “Malta also had a Byzantine period, so we venerate Byzantine saints as well,” I was told.
At Digli, in the north-west of the country, at the end of a winding road paved with stone reminiscent of the roads of Dobrogea, I gazed out over the Mediterranean from a height of four hundred metres: an endless green-and-blue vista, instilling in the soul a mixture of joy and tranquillity.
As is well known, after being arrested in Jerusalem, the Apostle Paul requested to be tried by Caesar in Rome, as he was a Roman citizen. He set off for Rome by ship, under escort, but after a journey full of trials and tribulations, the ship was shipwrecked in Malta, where Paul spent the winter, being warmly welcomed by the locals, as is evident from the final chapter, 28, of the Acts of the Apostles. I wanted to see St Paul’s Bay (La Baia di San Paolo) and had the opportunity to do so on two occasions; the last time at a breathtaking sunset.
In recent years, St Paul’s Bay – or ‘St Paul by the Sea’, as the Maltese prefer to call it – has become a small town. At the beginning of the last century, wealthy people used to build a house here on the shore to spend the warm summer months in peace, coolness and comfort. That tranquillity was still there even over thirty years ago. I saw the Apostle’s Spring there, from which Paul is said to have quenched his thirst immediately after the shipwreck. A church was also built there, the Church of the Fire, where Paul cast the viper into the flames (Acts XXVIII, 7–8). A place of worship also arose on the site of the former residence of the Roman governor Publius, who received and hosted the preacher of the Gospel for three days (Acts 28:7–8). Over time, churches were built successively, one on top of the other; at the lowest level of these superimposed structures, archaeologists have uncovered Roman remains.
On 8 April, our Polish and Hungarian guests left, and the following day we travelled to the other island, Gozo, which gave us the chance to spend half an hour sailing across the Mediterranean. Gozo is a peaceful island, with fewer inhabitants than Malta and farmland that gave it a rustic feel. There had been a plan for a bridge, designed by two Japanese engineers, to link the two islands, and people breathed a sigh of relief when it was abandoned. The 300-year-old cathedral in Gozo, shaped like a Latin cross with frothy-white exterior walls, and its square suggested stylistic similarities with Lampedusa in Sicily, less than a hundred kilometres away.
The next day I went out on my own for the first time since arriving in Malta. From Sliema, at the ‘Dragonara’ hotel, through the suburb of St Julian’s, I reached the bay and harbour of Marsaxlokk, which I’d glimpsed several times through the car window as I passed by. Now I could look at them up close, at my leisure, the brightly coloured boats gleaming in the strong sunlight – it was a day like those we have in early June back home – boats that exist only in Malta, just as gondolas are found only in Venice. The fish market in the harbour was also full of colour, with crabs, octopuses and moustachioed lobsters spread out on the stalls. As for the enclosed balconies of some multi-storey buildings, at the time I had no other point of comparison than the balconies of the houses in old Constanța or Brăila.
The day before we left, I went to revisit the Cathedral of the Order of St John, built in the 16th century and considered, until 1798, one of the richest churches in the world. At that time, the island was occupied by Napoleon’s armies, and the cathedral was plundered of its precious ornaments and treasures. In the same year, the Knights Hospitaller left Malta for good. I went into the oratory – there was no one else in the church – to gaze at length at the painting The Beheading of St John the Baptist, Caravaggio’s vast work (3 metres by 5), dating from 1608, considered his masterpiece and his only signed painting.
