Stop 10 of 11
Senglea Basilica
A town rebuilt from almost nothing
Narration · 3 min
Have it read to you while you look at the thing itself, hands in pockets.
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Guide to Senglea Basilica
Senglea — Isla to everybody who lives there — is a narrow finger of land with a church at its centre, and it has been destroyed twice: once by the Ottomans in 1565 and once by bombing between 1940 and 1943. The basilica lost its dome to a direct hit and was rebuilt by a population that came back.
Città Invicta
After Fort St Elmo fell, Senglea and Birgu took the full weight of the Ottoman assault, including a seaborne attack across the creek that was thrown back at the water's edge.
When it ended the town was wreckage, and the Order gave it the title Città Invicta, the unconquered city. The words are on Senglea's coat of arms.
1940 to 1943
Senglea lies immediately beside the dockyard, and the dockyard was the target. The usual estimate is that the great majority of the town's buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The basilica took a direct hit and the dome came down. Photographs from 1942 show these streets as canyons of rubble.
One date, three meanings
What happened next is the part worth noticing: the town was rebuilt on much the same street pattern, by people who returned to it, and the basilica was reconstructed and reconsecrated.
The dedication is to the Nativity of Our Lady, and her feast falls on 8 September: the day the Great Siege ended, and the day on which Malta remembers coming through the second one. The statue venerated in the basilica is one of the island's most important, and each year the festa carries it along roads that older residents remember as rubble.
What to look at
- The Città Invicta arms — the town’s title from 1565
- Rebuilt sections of the basilica, visible in the stone colour
- Wartime memorial plaques on the surrounding houses
Practical
- Opening
- Generally open mornings and evenings around services.
- Festa
- The eighth of September, and it is one of the biggest in Malta.
Walk to stop 11
Continue to the very end of the peninsula, where the land runs out into a small garden on the point.
About 4 min · 320 m