Faith and Feast in Gzira: A Saint, the Bells and a Coat of Arms

Part of Gzira Histories, a continuing series on the town’s past.

A parish is a building, but a town is what happens around it — the classes, the band, the bells, the week in July when the streets are dressed. This is that layer of Gzira’s history, and it is stranger than the church records make it sound.

In short: Malta’s first canonised saint taught catechism in a rented room above a Gzira bakery. A bar that served the fleet paid for the parish church’s main door. The bells came from Loughborough, the clock from Holland, and the town’s coat of arms from the head of a family claiming the old Crown of Aragon, presented by a Scottish laird at a local hotel.

A saint above the bakery

In 1934 Dun Ġorġ Preca — founder of the MUSEUM, the lay catechism society, and in 2007 Malta’s first canonised saint — asked Patist Pantalleresco, the baker, whether he had anywhere to rent. Patist offered a small house at 42 Triq Reid, just up from the bakery: two rooms and a kitchen. It opened as Gzira’s first MUSEUM centre on 8 December 1934, and teaching began five days later. It moved to larger premises on Triq Ponsonby in 1936 and again in 1962, to the house where it still meets.

Preca came often, and when word spread that he would be speaking at the open-air talks the society organised, the crowds swelled and people stayed afterwards to have rosaries blessed. On visits he handed out sweets, two to each child — to remember, he told them, that Christ has two natures. He blessed them first, against illness. One small boy with an English surname, McNerney, ran home with his, because his brother had earache. Rather than give it to him to eat, he put it in his brother’s ear. The record does not say whether it worked.

The centre took root fast. Its first superior was appointed in July 1935; that June, thirty-seven boys had made their first communion through it, and by Christmas 1936 it was running the town’s first procession of the Christ Child. Through the war, as bombs fell and families fled to the villages, the numbers thinned but the classes never stopped. A girls’ centre opened too, on Triq l-Immakulata Kunċizzjoni. The boys’ centre has now been teaching in Gzira for more than ninety years.

Preca and the parish priest Dun Carlo Manché were close friends. When Manché died, the archbishop wanted a particular man as successor — Dun Pawl Galea, a Gozitan chaplain to an order of nuns — who was reluctant and went to ask Preca’s advice. Go, Preca told him; you will do good, and the MUSEUM members will help you. Galea took the parish in March 1951. Two years later Preca came to the parish church himself to bless a wedding, a rare thing for him; the groom was the brother of the woman who had looked after him for years. A photograph survives.

In 2009 the parish hung a painting of him, by the Gozitan artist Paolo Camilleri Cauchi, paid for by the son of Preca’s own doctor. It was placed on the side altar of St Paul’s Shipwreck — an altar Dun Pawl Galea had paid for out of his own pocket in 1964. The two priests who agreed in 1951 that Galea should take the parish ended up, after a fashion, on the same altar.

The door the bar paid for

Galea ran the parish for fifteen years and left it physically transformed, and the first thing he did tells you exactly what kind of town this was. The church’s new main door, in 1951, was paid for by Ganni Vassallo — who ran the Blue Haven, a bar on the Msida road opposite the public garden, where a fast-food restaurant stands now. Money from the fleet years went into the door of the church. Nobody seems to have found that odd.

Then a marble floor in 1953. Then the bells, cast by John Taylor’s foundry in Loughborough and blessed by Archbishop Gonzi in the grounds of Stella Maris College on 30 June 1957 — the last set in Malta consecrated with the old rite before the Second Vatican Council changed it. The church itself was consecrated on 23 May 1959.

And finally the clock: electric, from Petit & Fritzen in Aarle in the Netherlands, with five small carillon bells tuned to the first five notes of the scale, each embossed with the name of the parishioner who paid for it. A master clock in the sacristy sends a pulse up to the belfry every minute, and on the hour the carillon plays the Ave Maria, so that the whole town is reminded whose parish it is.

The big bells have names. The hours used to be struck on Pia, nine hundredweight in the old Maltese measure, and the quarters on little Paula — until it was found that the hammers were damaging their rims, and the carillon took over the job.

Getting it installed nearly finished him. Customs held it up and charged a duty he had never expected, and the old priest, ill by then, walked down to the customs house again and again in the July sun to argue it out. It was finally running for the feast on 10 July 1966. He retired that September. At his funeral in October 1970, the bells he had fought for rang for him.

Over the side doors he had a line carved that answers the chapel down the road: Din hija d-dar t’Alla, dar tat-talb. This is the house of God, a house of prayer.

The band

The Mount Carmel band was born out of the war, when the town was close to empty. It was founded on the will of two men — Meme Scicluna, who built the stadium, and Dun Carlo Manché — and it is the only band in Malta founded within Catholic Action. Gilardu Cristiano, a bandsman from Valletta’s La Valette society, taught music theory to the first local boys in a room on Triq Coleridge, and borrowed players from elsewhere until Gzira could field its own.

Securing the club’s premises took more than three years of negotiation with the government and the War Damage Department, and was settled only when Dr Turu Colombo — the doctor from the shelter shafts — intervened. In March 1953 a young bandmaster, Carmelo G. Borg, took charge; he had married a Gzira girl three years before.

One of those first boys, Joe Mercieca, remembered his father — the club’s barman, a man from Ħamrun delighted that Gzira finally had a band — buying him a Boosey & Hawkes clarinet for twenty-five pounds, a fortune in the poverty after the war. In 1955 Joe emigrated to Australia because there was no work. He came back for the July feast whenever he could, and when he retired, he came home to Gzira for good.

Among the other first bandsmen were three brothers, Pawlu, Karmenu and Duminku Pantalleresco — sons of Patist the baker, the same man who had rented St George Preca his rooms on Triq Reid. The club’s president in those years was a court marshal called Iro Vella, remembered above all as a disciplinarian. In a town this size, everyone turns up in everyone else’s story.

The feast

The feast falls on the second Sunday of July, close to the anniversary of the thrown stone. For decades each street had its own volunteer group dressing it with banners, pavilions and paper flags, and the streets competed openly for the best display. The golden jubilee in 1971 brought a full week of marches and fireworks. A Risen Christ procession was added at Easter 1980, after years of persistence from two parishioners; it still goes out.

Theatre was part of it too. Dun Carlo Manché turned the yard of the parish priest’s house into a small stage, and parish groups were still putting on plays in the first parish hall in the 1960s. The Risen Christ statue that leads the Easter procession today was carved in 1984 by Alfred Camilleri Cauchi.

And one year the fireworks arrived by accident. In 1984 the Imqabba fireworks society that supplied Gzira was in an internal dispute and had not fired its own village’s display — so on the eve of Gzira’s feast, the seafront, the bridge and the way onto Manoel Island were packed with ground fireworks, and the town got the spectacle of its life.

A coat of arms from Aragon, via Skye

Every Maltese town has a coat of arms, and for most of its life Gzira had none. One local historian gives two reasons with refreshing candour: it was a new town, and it carried the stigma of its bar years.

A civic committee was elected in December 1969, and its secretary, Baron Kelinu Vella Haber, offered to fix it. Vella Haber was Gozitan by birth, lived seventy of his hundred years in Gzira, and was a dramatist, broadcaster and teacher who edited Malta’s first farming magazines. He was also chamberlain to Don Roberto II Paternò Ayerbe Aragona, head of a Sicilian family claiming the heritage of the old Royal House of Aragon.

On 5 February 1970 — the feast of St Agatha, patron of both Malta and that house — Don Roberto signed a decree granting Gzira its arms: gold, with four red pales, and a dolphin beneath, under a civic crown. On 9 March the decree was presented to the press at the Kennedy Hotel in Gzira by his emissary, the Count of Valldemosa, Charles Roy MacKinnon of Dunakin, Laird of Skye. On 11 July 1970 the town held its first Gzira Day and received the arms in public on the church steps, from a second emissary who had come from Coventry. Gzira made Don Roberto an honorary citizen in return.

Vella Haber chose the motto too: Recte Floreat — may it flourish rightly. The original documents are kept at the band club, made over to it by notarial act so that no individual can ever claim them. A heraldic grant from a claimant to the Crown of Aragon, delivered by a Scottish laird in a seafront hotel: it is either the most Maltese or the least Maltese way a town has ever acquired a coat of arms, and Gzira has never seemed troubled by which.

Don Roberto added a further flourish: every president of Gzira’s civic council, for as long as he held office, would be a Knight Grand Cross of the Military Order of the Collar of St Agatha. The civic council itself had no money and no formal powers — its proudest practical achievement, one member recalled, was persuading the Malta Playing Fields Association to put swings in the public garden in 1968. Gzira had a public garden but nowhere for its children to swing until then. Vella Haber, who lived to a hundred, was later awarded the national honour Gieh ir-Repubblika, and when he died in 2014 the band played a funeral march its bandmaster had written for him.

The parish priests

For the record, since the town remembers its parish priests the way other places remember mayors: Dun Anton Manché, 1921 to 1935, who built the church; Dun Carlo Manché, 1935 to 1950, the war priest; Dun Pawl Galea, 1951 to 1966, who gave it its bells and clock; and Canon Dun Ġużepp Theuma from 1967, who saw through the golden jubilee and the coat of arms. After them came Dun Walter Cauchi, Dun Noel Grima, Dun Victor Scicluna, Dun Vincenz Cachia and Dun Karm Tanti, and in December 2020 Dun Gordon Refalo — installed, because of the pandemic, in the rebuilt chapel on Manoel Island rather than the parish church.

The parish sent its own sons outward, too: at least two Gzira-born priests left for the missions in Brazil from the 1950s onwards. A town that began as a quarantine station across the water has been exporting people ever since — to Australia for work, to Brazil for the Church, to London for jazz.

Frequently asked questions

What is the connection between St George Preca and Gzira?

Preca, Malta's first canonised saint, opened the town's first MUSEUM catechism centre on 8 December 1934 in a two-room house at 42 Triq Reid, rented from the baker downstairs. It moved to Triq Ponsonby, where it still operates. He visited often, was a close spiritual friend of the parish priest Dun Carlo Manché, and blessed a wedding in the parish church in 1953.

When is the Gzira festa?

The feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated on the second Sunday of July, close to the anniversary of the thrown stone of 10 July 1902 that founded the parish's devotion. The week before brings band marches, street decorations and fireworks.

How did Gzira get its coat of arms?

In 1970. The town had none, and its civic committee secretary, Baron Kelinu Vella Haber, obtained a grant from Don Roberto II Paternò Ayerbe Aragona, head of a family claiming the heritage of the Royal House of Aragon. The arms — gold, four red pales and a dolphin — were presented at the Kennedy Hotel in Gzira on 9 March 1970, and to the town on its first Gzira Day, 11 July 1970. Vella Haber also chose the motto, Recte Floreat.

Sources and further reading

This post draws on the following. Most are articles from the annual festa programmes of the Gzira parish and the Mount Carmel band club, digitised and freely available in the University of Malta’s OAR@UM repository; Maltese titles are glossed in English.

San Ġorġ Preca u l-Gżira [St George Preca and Gzira] — John Formosa. Festa programme, 2011.

Il-M.U.S.E.U.M. tas-subien fil-Gżira [The boys’ MUSEUM centre] — Jason Pawney. Festa programme, 2012.

L-arloġġ tal-knisja jagħlaq 41 sena [The church clock turns 41] — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2007.

Ritratt storiku fis-sala ewlenija [A historic photograph of the first bandsmen] — Joseph Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2010.

B’radd ta’ ħajr lejn il-fundaturi tal-kumitat [The feast committee, 1970–2010] — Malcolm Camilleri. Festa programme, 2010.

Kif il-belt tal-Gżira kisbet l-istemma ċivika tagħha [How Gzira obtained its coat of arms, with the 1970 contract] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira, 1971.

L-Istemma oriġinali tal-Gżira [Gzira’s original coat of arms] — Joseph Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2007.

Tislima lill-baruni Kelinu Vella Haber [Tribute to Baron Kelinu Vella Haber] — Għaqda Mużikali Mount Carmel. Festa programme, 2014.

Storja tal-parroċċa tal-Gżira [History of the parish] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira, 1996.

Il-Knisja Parrokkjali ta’ Sant’Antnin fil-Forti Manoel [The parish church of St Anthony in Fort Manoel] — Ivan Said. Festa programme, 2026.

Previously: What Gzira Built

Next: Reading the Streets of Gzira (publishing 15 November)

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira, within earshot of the Ave Maria on the hour. morrisoncourt.com.