We are fortunate enough to have just moved into a recently restored house in Birgu. To celebrate the beautiful city where we live, in this post I am going to write about and share pictures of the features of a traditional Maltese ‘house of character’. This particular house is built on four levels, and I will highlight points of interest on each floor, starting at the front door.
As with other houses of character, the first things to notice are the intricate wrought iron gates, topped with a brass bar. Local residents can often be seen standing at their gates, chatting to neighbours or engaging tourists with some titbits of local knowledge.
Behind the gates are the main double doors, one often left open to encourage light and air circulation into the hallway. Finally there are the inner doors, typically with coloured glass and forming a small inner porch.
This multilayered entrance system is mirrored in the traditional windows throughout the house. Each window has an integral shutter, allowing for different functions. In the winter the shutters can be opened and the windows left closed, letting light in but not allowing heat to escape. In the summer the shutters can be left locked against the glass and the windows left ajar. This allows for increased air circulation but keeps the bright sunlight out of the house.
In this house the doorway leads onto a spiral staircase with more ironwork in the stair rail. The walls are of limestone, the traditional building material of Maltese houses. This staircase leads all the way up from the front door to the roof terrace, in our case a daunting fifty-five steps.
From the stairway on the first and second floors are the main living rooms that contain classic features of the house of character. On the floors are different designs of Maltese traditional tiles, these being just a few of the many designs that can be seen across the islands.
The high ceilings are equally interesting. As might be expected they are supported by huge wooden beams. Wood however has always been scarce on the Maltese islands, so rather than the ceilings being made of wooden planks, they are traditionally built from limestone slabs.
These rooms also are adorned by gallariji or balconies, features that have become synonymous with the traditional Maltese building style. Typically brightly coloured, these gallariji have multiple functions. Their contribution to air circulation helps to keep the rooms behind them cool. Many residents hang their washing from the windows. Some older people lower baskets from them to street level, so that the men who operate the bread and vegetable vans can send up their produce without requiring the resident to make the long journey down the stairs. Most importantly they are a vantage point from which people can watch the activity below, or hold conversations with their neighbours across the street.
At roof level are two rooms that are less ornate in their finish, presumably intended originally to be storerooms. And finally the stairs lead to the roof terrace, an open space used for anything from drying washing to summer barbecues. Again, these terraces are an ideal space from which to watch the world below passing by.
The rooms I have described so far were built any time between the late 1500s and the early 1700s, and it is likely that each floor was added separately, the property gradually increasing in height. Incredibly, the house survived World War Two relatively unscathed, even though (as I mentioned in an earlier post) the Dominican Convent across the road was completely destroyed during a bombing raid.
Now I return to the ground floor, which according to our architect was most likely built in the late 1400s. Originally a completely separate property, the front door was at some point converted into a window, and the small ground floor apartment joined to the property above to create the house of character.
This room contains features different from elsewhere in the house. First of all, the roof is not supported by wooden beams, but by stone arches.
Unusually, these arches only reach part way down the walls. They do not support the ceiling from ground level but rely on similar arches in the neighbouring properties. The weight of the ceiling pushes downwards and sideways, and each arch is supported by a suitably positioned arch next door.
The other structure of interest in this room is the underground water cistern in the corner. This is a bell-shaped cavern, hollowed out of the rock below the house, originally used to collect rainwater.
The restoration of the house is almost complete. All that remains is the installation of a roof-top flag-pole. As I’ve previously posted, flags are an important element of Birgu street decorations, and we plan to join with our neighbours in flying flags on all the relevant holy days and national holidays throughout the year, as well as during both the festas each August.
just an interesting note about the inner doors, in Malta these are commonly called antiporta derived from the Italian language but it is interesting to know that in the Cottonera area they are also called Boxla (pronounced boshla in English)) which also means compass. A second interesting fact is that in that era they built high ceilings to keep the rooms cool (heat is lighter therefore it rises up). also it is common to find walls thicker then in modern buildings as this prevents the heat penetrating at a slower rate and vice versa with the cold. And one last thing, almost all the houses at the front door had a brass handle attached to a chain ,when pulled it would ring a bell inside, since there was no electricity at the time this served as a door bell and obviously with the introduction of electricity these were all replaced by time . but you can see a fine example of this contraption at 4. Main Gate Street (my grandmothers old house)