Stop 14 of 25
St Paul’s Shipwreck
A wrist bone, a column, and the island’s founding story
Free to hear. You have 3 of three free stops left, on any tours.
Guide to St Paul’s Shipwreck
A collegiate church on a street too narrow to step back from, dedicated to the event Malta treats as the beginning of its history: the shipwreck of St Paul on the island in about AD 60. It holds a statue by Melchiorre Gafà, a wrist bone of the saint and a fragment of the column of his beheading, and it is the starting point of a national holiday every February.
The story in Acts
The Acts of the Apostles describes Paul, under arrest and bound for trial in Rome, aboard a grain ship that broke up in a storm on an island called Melita. The islanders lit a fire on the shore in the rain; Paul shook a viper from his hand into the flames unharmed, stayed three months, and healed the father of the island’s chief man, Publius.
Malta has read Melita as Malta ever since, Publius as its first bishop, and the episode as the start of a Christianity older than almost any in Europe.
The building and what is in it
The first church here was by Girolamo Cassar in the 1570s; the present one was begun in 1639 and given its front in 1885. The wooden statue of St Paul inside was carved in 1659 by Melchiorre Gafà, the finest sculptor Malta produced, who died in Rome at thirty-one.
The relics are a bone from the saint’s right wrist and a fragment of the column on which, by tradition, he was beheaded in Rome.
The tenth of February
The feast of the Shipwreck is a public holiday. The statue is carried out through these doors and around the streets, and the country takes the day off. A nation that dates itself from a shipwreck, and celebrates the day, is saying something about how it sees itself.
What to look at
- The 1885 front, a good deal younger than the church behind it
- The processional route markers and feast decorations, if you are here in early February
- How the street narrows here — the church was built before anyone worried about seeing it whole
Practical
- Opening
- A working parish church; open around services and for much of the day, closed at lunchtime.
- Terrain
- St Lucia Street slopes down from Republic Street; the last section below the church is stepped.
Walk to stop 15 · Is-Suq tal-Belt
Climb St Lucia Street back to Merchants Street and turn right. The market is the long stone front on your right; stand in the pedestrian area in front of it.
About 4 min · 202 m
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