Stop 15 of 15
St Agatha’s Crypt & Catacombs
Painted walls underground
Keep going
Stop one of Mdina plays straight away. The other 14 are one payment:
- Every stop from here to St Agatha’s Crypt & Catacombs, narrated
- The map following you from stop to stop, hands free
- The whole tour saved to your phone — no signal, no roaming
Not sure yet? Start with Mdina Gate & the Ditch.
The written guide below is open either way.
Guide to St Agatha’s Crypt & Catacombs
A crypt and a second catacomb complex a few minutes from St Paul’s, beneath a church and museum run by a mission society. Tradition holds that Agatha of Catania hid in the cave during the persecution of Decius; its walls carry around thirty medieval frescoes, the largest group of wall paintings on Malta, several defaced in the Ottoman raid of 1551.
Agatha on Malta
Agatha was a young Christian of Catania in the mid-third century, when the emperor Decius ordered the persecution of the Church. Maltese tradition has her fleeing here, hiding and praying in this cave, and returning to Sicily, where she was tortured and killed in 251. She is one of the three patrons of Mdina, with Paul and Publius, and stands with them on the inside of the main gate.
The painted crypt
The cave became a chapel in the Middle Ages and its walls were painted repeatedly between about 1200 and the end of the fifteenth century. Around thirty frescoes survive, mostly rows of saints in the Byzantine-influenced manner of medieval Sicily. Several faces were scratched out by an Ottoman raiding party in 1551, the raid that carried off most of the population of Gozo.
The catacombs and the museum
The catacombs beyond the crypt are Roman and early Christian, with the same rock-cut tombs and canopied graves as St Paul’s, and are far less visited. The museum above holds finds from them alongside the miscellany a mission society gathers over a century: Egyptian antiquities, fossils and church silver.
The walk ends here. Rabat’s cafés and bus stops are a few minutes back past the parish church.
What to look at
- The scratched-out faces in the crypt frescoes, the mark of 1551
- The rock-cut canopied tombs in the catacombs, the same form as at St Paul’s
- The church above, small and plain, on top of two thousand years of digging
Practical
- Visiting
- Admission charged; the crypt is visited with a guide at set times. Steps down; not accessible.
- Onward
- Buses and cafés are in the centre of Rabat, a few minutes back along St Paul Street.