How Gzira Became a Town: An Arch, a Road and a Thrown Stone
Updated: Nov 4
Part of Gzira Histories, a continuing series on the town’s past.
Gzira as a town is young, and it exists because of a road. Everything else — the parish, the church, the schools, the shops — followed from the decision to make this coast passable.
In short: a stone arch raised in 1796 marks the widening of the road from Msida toward Sliema, and it predates the town by more than a century. The main street still carries a French name, after a knight who kept a summer house here. The parish was created only in 1921, and it owes its existence to three drunken sailors and a thrown stone.
The arch that came first
At the Msida end of the main road there is something almost nobody stops for. The Fawwara Gate is a stone archway raised in 1796 by the Testaferrata family, to commemorate the opening of a widened main road running from Msida toward Sliema.
The inscription on it reads, in translation:
For public and private convenience, from the wealth of Baron Testaferrata — Fra Nikola Butiu saw to the widening of the road, in the year 1796.
Before Rue d’Argens existed, the road from Msida to Sliema ran through that arch. When it was built this was still Birkirkara’s territory; Gzira did not yet exist as a place with a name. The arch is older than the town around it by well over a century, and it marks the single decision that made the town possible at all.
It still stands on Triq Jerry Zammit, beside the Muscat motor showroom, generally ignored and badly in need of restoration. The Testaferrata name on it is not incidental: the Sciberras Testaferrata family once owned most of the land on which Valletta, Sliema, Gzira, Msida and St Julian’s now stand. And the arch was not the only one — old photographs show that anyone crossing the bridge to Manoel Island also passed through a gateway very like it.
Rue d’Argens
The main road through Gzira is still signposted in French, and is one of very few streets in Malta that is. It runs from the old Msida police station, climbs through the middle of the town, and keeps going up to the Savoy hill — which is where Gzira ends and Sliema begins.
It is named after Fra Luc de Boyer d’Argens, a French nobleman and knight of the Order who rose to be Commander of Artillery. His name is on this street in particular because he kept a summer residence in Gzira, and the building still stands, up near the Savoy hill where Triq Cuschieri is now.
He is worth a paragraph for the cannon alone. When Francisco Ximenes de Texada was elected Grand Master in 1773, d’Argens presented him with a bronze cannon commissioned in Venice. Twenty-five years later Napoleon expelled the Order from Malta, admired the cannon enough to take it to Egypt with the rest of the plunder, and then lost it: the British destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir and captured the lot. The cannon went to England as a prize of war, was displayed at the Tower of London, and sits today in the Royal Armouries at Leeds.
A Gzira street is named after the man who paid for it.
He turns up in one of the stranger episodes of the period too. Dun Gejtanu Mannarino, who led the priests’ revolt against the Order, was in Gozo running processions of theatrical intensity — young women masked and crowned with thorns, the priest scourging himself in the pulpit. D’Argens, on business there, saw it and reported it to both the Grand Master and the Church. Bishop Pellerano summoned Mannarino to Malta and suspended him from preaching.
Tempting as it is, the name has nothing to do with argent. It is a man, not silver.
The town arrives
The usual account dates Gzira’s beginnings to the nineteenth century, when Chevalier Jacob Tagliaferro built a villa on what was then open coastal land — the first building of consequence here. A settlement grew around it as an overflow of Sliema, which was becoming the fashionable seaside resort of British colonial Malta.
For a long time it barely had a name. Gzira’s first inhabitants were a handful of farmers and fishermen scattered between the shore and Wied il-Kappara; old addresses refer to its seafront not as Gzira at all but as Molo di Sliema. Ecclesiastically it belonged first to the parish of St Helen in Birkirkara, and then, from 1878, to Stella Maris in Sliema — whose priests remembered carrying the sacrament to the dying along rough field paths, under a canopy, in all weathers.
The devotion that would define the town was here before the town was. Long before Gzira had a parish, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was kept with enthusiasm across this stretch of coast — older residents remembered horse races being run for it, across open ground that is now streets. But in both neighbouring parishes the Carmelite feast was gradually pushed aside, at Stella Maris by the arrival of a new statue of its own patron and in Msida by a reshuffle of feast days in 1900. It needed somewhere else to land.
Where Sliema was fashionable, Gzira was practical. It filled with working families, trades, and the services a port town needs. Transport links and the growth of Sliema and St Julian’s between them gave the place its life.
The church records the timeline precisely. On 7 July 1913 Archbishop Pietro Pace raised the small chapel to vice-parish status, still under Sliema. On 15 May 1921 Archbishop Dom Mauro Caruana created the independent parish of Gzira, with Our Lady of Mount Carmel as its church.
It was Pentecost Sunday, and the timing carried a second meaning: only weeks earlier Malta had opened its first parliament under the new self-governing constitution. A town and a country were both acquiring a voice in the same spring.
The stone that made a parish
And the parish has an origin story, which is why the church is known locally as tal-Ġebla — of the Stone.
A painting of Our Lady of Mount Carmel hung in a wooden niche on Triq Manoel, and next to the niche was a drinking shop. On 10 July 1902, three drunken British sailors — William Walls, Charles Thurbull and John Packhun — tried to force their way in for a drink. The bar was shut, and its owner, Karmnu Brincat, would not open. They threw stones at the place, and one of them struck the niche, broke the glass over the painting, and lodged there, caught between two panes, without reaching the image behind.
It was taken far more seriously than a broken window usually is. The Church sent two architects, Galizia and Trevisan, to examine the stone in place and report to the bishop — because the insult had come from the foreign power that had ruled Malta for a century, at a moment when Maltese leaders were fighting London over the constitution and the language of the courts. The next day the young priest serving the area, Dun Anton Manché, prised the stone free and took it to the parish priest of Stella Maris — his own brother, Dun Vinċenz Manché. The painting was carried to Sliema in procession for three days of prayers of reparation, and people started calling it the Madonna of the Stone.
When the painting came back from Sliema, it was set in a small shrine at the corner of Triq Manoel de Vilhena and Triq Cameron, where mass began to be said daily — and that shrine still stands, a few streets from our door. Dun Anton then built a small chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy to receive it. It held about two hundred people and quickly became a little Marian sanctuary, with visitors coming from across Malta and Gozo. You can still see what they left: silver ex-votos in two cases beside the painting as you enter the sacristy — babies, feet, eyes, a leg — each one a prayer answered, an illness cured, a fracture healed.
And the evidence was kept. The frame, the broken glass and the stone itself have all been preserved, and they are still in the parish church today — the founding object of a parish, a lump of rock thrown by a drunk sailor at closing time, kept as carefully as any relic.
The parish records call it an ugly act, and then note what followed: it was the beginning of the devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Gzira, and of the pressure to build a proper church. A soldiers’ brawl outside a bar is the founding event of the parish, which is about as Gzira as anything in this series.
Gzira became the first parish in Malta dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel — and remains the only Carmelite parish on the islands run by diocesan priests rather than Carmelite friars.
Building a church for it was an act of collective will. Major Gużeppi Muscat gave the land free, prompting the question everyone asked: why build one so big? The master builder Antonio Sammut — known as iċ-Ċirwiel, who had put up many of the British army’s barracks — offered to build it at cost, and the architect Francesco Saverio Caruana signed the plans without charge. For seventeen years the town raised the rest door to door, with fairs and tombolas; the Stella Maris band played the fairs for free, and its very first engagement outside Sliema had been Gzira’s feast of 1914. The design broke with tradition: not a Latin cross but a long basilican plan, its nave carried on six columns of Maltese coralline limestone.
Sammut put his employee, the builder Gejtu Sciberras, on the job and came by every day to watch it go up. The finished church closely resembles the one at Marsa, built a decade earlier — the same long nave, the same light from great lunette windows — in a Doric style chosen for its plainness.
Work on the present church began in 1921 and the structure was finished in December 1935. It was not consecrated until 23 May 1959, by Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi. Thirty-eight years from parish to consecration, which tells you something about how a working-class town pays for a church.
The man who carried it through was Dun Anton Manché, from Birkirkara, who arrived in 1902 aged thirty-three and became Gzira’s first parish priest in 1921. One local historian calls him the Father of Gzira, and not only for the church: it was largely his lobbying that brought the town its first electric light, mains water and drainage. He died in February 1935 with the church almost finished, and the primary school carries his name. Because a younger priest of the same surname followed him, Gzira remembers him affectionately as Manché ix-Xiħ — the old Manché. His successor, Dun Carlo, is the subject of the next part of this series.
It stands on Triq de Vilhena — named for the Grand Master who built the fort on the island the town is named after. Twin bell towers, and across the portico the words MADONNA BERIKNA. In the pediment, a mosaic flanked by two dates: 1921 and 1971, the parish’s founding and its golden jubilee.
The parish was larger then than now. Ta’ Xbiex, with its villas and embassies, belonged to it until it was made a parish of its own in the late 1960s, and the line with Sliema’s Sacro Cuor parish was only fixed in 1942, by agreement between the two parish priests: Triq Moroni and Triq Parisio, which still mark it.
The decade that built the town
Notice the dates stacking up. The parish was created in 1921 and its church rose through to 1935. The Empire Sports Ground opened in 1922 and was rebuilt as a thirty-thousand-seat stadium in 1933. The Wembley ice-cream factory went up in 1937. Stella Maris College moved in in 1938. Our own townhouse belongs to the same window.
Within roughly fifteen years Gzira acquired a parish, a national stadium, a landmark factory and a college — the full set of things that turn a suburb into a town with its own gravity. Then the war arrived.
Frequently asked questions
When did Gzira become a town?
Late. Development began in the nineteenth century around a villa built by Chevalier Jacob Tagliaferro, as an overflow of Sliema. The chapel was raised to vice-parish status on 7 July 1913 and Gzira became an independent parish only on 15 May 1921, under Archbishop Dom Mauro Caruana.
Why is the Gzira parish church called tal-Gebla?
Tal-Ġebla means 'of the Stone'. On 10 July 1902 three drunken British sailors threw stones at a bar on Triq Manoel whose owner had refused to open. One stone struck a niche holding a painting of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, broke the glass and lodged between the panes without damaging the image. The parish records treat that incident as the beginning of the devotion.
Why does Gzira have a street with a French name?
Rue d'Argens is named after Fra Luc de Boyer d'Argens, a French knight of the Order who rose to Commander of Artillery and kept a summer residence in Gzira. It is one of very few streets in Malta that kept a French name, and has nothing to do with the French word for silver.
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.
Rue D’Argens — Joseph C. Sant. Festa programme, 2016, pp. 39–40.
L-istorja tal-Gżira [The history of Gzira] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira. 75th anniversary publication, 1996, pp. 10–13.
L-istorja tal-Gżira — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, Għaqda Mużikali Mount Carmel, 2001.
L-istorja tal-parroċċa tal-Gżira — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2002.
Il-miraklu tal-ġebla [The miracle of the stone] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira, 2002.
Storja tal-parroċċa tal-Gżira [History of the parish] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira, 1996.
Il-Gżira fl-imgħoddi [Gzira in the past] — Mario Fenech. Festa programme, 2009.
L-ismijiet tat-toroq tal-Gżira [The street names of Gzira] — Bernard Scicluna. Festa programme, 2008, p. 21ff.
Previously: The Island That Named the Town
Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira. morrisoncourt.com.
