Stop 05 of 12
The Gozo Museum of Archaeology
Five thousand years, in a house by the gate
Free to hear. You have 3 of three free stops left, on any tours.
Guide to The Gozo Museum of Archaeology
Casa Bondi, a seventeenth-century house just inside the Citadella gate, holds the Gozo Museum of Archaeology: finds from the Ġgantija temples and the Xagħra Circle, older than the pyramids, then Phoenician and Roman Gaulos, and the Majmuna Stone, an Arabic gravestone of 1174 for a Muslim girl.
Ġgantija and the Xagħra Circle
The Ġgantija temples at Xagħra, a few kilometres east, were raised around 3600 BC by people who had crossed from Sicily by boat and worked stone with stone. They are older than Stonehenge and, by roughly a thousand years, than the pyramids of Egypt. The Xagħra Circle beside them, an underground burial complex excavated in the 1980s and 1990s, yielded some of the finest small carvings of the prehistoric Mediterranean, the best of which are kept here.
Gaulos, and a gravestone in Arabic
The museum continues through Phoenician and Roman Gaulos, the modest provincial town on this hill, and ends with the Majmuna Stone: a marble gravestone carved in 1174 for a young Muslim girl, in Kufic Arabic script. It is the clearest evidence that Muslim Gozo lasted a century after the Normans came, and that a child who died here had parents who could pay for very fine lettering.
What to look at
- The house itself, a town house of the Order’s period with a courtyard behind
- The Majmuna Stone, in the last room
- The temple models, which explain Ġgantija better than Ġgantija does
Practical
- Tickets
- Admission charged, usually on the combined ticket for the Citadella museums. Allow forty minutes.
- Terrain
- A few steps at the door; uneven paving in the lane.
Walk to stop 06 · The Cathedral & the Dome That Isn’t
Continue up the lane into the square in front of the cathedral steps.
About 1 min · 18 m
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