The Citadella Gate

An Ottoman force under Sinan Pasha, with the corsair Dragut alongside him, came to Malta, judged Birgu too strong and crossed to Gozo instead. The Citadella lasted a matter of days: the southern walls were old and the artillery ranged against them was far better than anything they had been built to withstand.

When the governor surrendered, almost the entire population of the island — the figures usually given run to five or six thousand, which was very nearly everyone — was taken off and sold into slavery in North Africa. Gozo had to be repopulated from Malta and Sicily over the following decades, which is why a number of Gozitan surnames appear abruptly in the records after that date.

The Knights rebuilt the southern walls between 1599 and 1622, angled and thickened for artillery. Those are the walls at the gate.

A law was also passed requiring every inhabitant of Gozo to spend the night within the Citadella, and it stayed in force until 1637. For eighty-six years an entire island climbed this hill each evening and came back down each morning to work the fields.

It helps to stop thinking of this as a castle somebody lived in. It was a room the whole island slept in, and everything inside the walls — the silos, the small houses, the cathedral — follows from that.