Why are we making a big splash about the 450th anniversary of the ‘Great Siege’?

I really don’t think it is appropriate at all to be celebrating, in 2015, the victory 450 years ago of the Knights of the Order of St John over random Ottoman raiders in a spurious, one-off battle.

Not even the Order of St John itself celebrates what is, 450 years later, a total non-event, so why is Malta?

It doesn’t make sense. It is offensive and ill-advised in the extreme to be talking of Christian victory over Muslims in this day and age. And it ignores our own history, too. Malta went on to have an excellent relationship with the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the 19th century.

Plenty of Maltese lived and worked throughout the Ottoman Empire and many citizens of the Ottoman Empire lived and worked in Malta, which is exactly why the Ottoman sovereign acquired land here (near the Marsa Club) and commissioned a Maltese architect, Emmanuel Luigi Galizia, to build a cemetery for his subjects who died in Malta.

The story of what was spuriously called ‘the Great Siege’ was nothing more than part of the systematic identity-building of Malta as an embryonic nation. It was part and parcel of all the other package that included Malta being Christian since Paul’s shipwreck, Count Roger expelling ‘the Muslims’ and rescuing ‘the Maltese’, the Knights of the Order of St John somehow being one and the same as the Maltese rather than ruling in hegemony over them to their own benefit and doing little or nothing for the natives, the British being evil colonisers, and World War II having been another person’s war in which ‘we’ became haplessly embroiled.

It’s interesting to see more fuss being planned for the 450th anniversary of ‘the Great Siege’ than there ever was for any anniversary of the real siege of Malta – that of 1941.

The politics of history are fascinating.