Undiscovered Malta: The grandmasters of miniaturization

Soldiers are ascetics, and their places of worship are as humble as their meals and graves.

We are standing in front of the main cathedral of the most powerful knightly order in the history of Christianity and have no doubt that it is the church of warriors, not of kings: the facade is unadorned and plain, almost barracks-like, decorated with nothing more than the likeness of the Redeemer, the Words "Salva nos" and the Maltese cross, the squat towers so low that one could easily shoot at the enemies from the garrisons higher up.

Jakob Strobel and Serra

deputy head of the feature section.

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Then we enter St. John's Co-Cathedral in the Maltese capital of Valletta and break away from the right faith in a flash.

Because we enter one of the most magnificent and magnificent rooms that we have ever seen, we immerse ourselves in an orgy of the high baroque, so radiant, so dazzling, as if the knights wanted to blind their godless adversaries with the sheer splendor of this church.

Every square centimeter is studded with gold leaf, marble or monumental paintings and the entire floor is completely covered with precious tombstones of deserving Knights of Malta, each one competing with its neighbor for the most filigree inlays, almost all decorated with skeletons and skulls as symbols of knightly sacrifice, but also with the trumpet-blowing angel of fame as witnesses of the triumph.

The Beheading of John the Baptist

The interior of the cathedral leaves no one in doubt that this temple of God was not built by some warhorse on a lonely outpost on the edge of the West, but by the proud defenders of Christianity, who fought on the front line against the Ottomans and Berbers, as earthly governors of the Almighty and wore the Maltese Cross with the self-confidence of invincible warriors of God.

In the cathedral it is emblazoned a hundredfold with its eight spikes, symbolizing not only the eight Beatitudes of the Apostle Matthew, but also the eight national departments of the order, called "tongues".

They all, the Castilians and Aragonese, Provençal and Auvergne, French and Italian, English and German, have their own side chapels,

who also try to surpass themselves in splendor - and yet not a single one comes close to the oratorio.

Dominated by the largest painting Caravaggio ever painted, the only one he ever signed, it depicts the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Knights of Malta.

The bare-backed executioner bends straight over the dying man and draws his knife to finally separate the Baptist's head from his body after the sword blow and place it in Salomé's golden bowl, an image of frighteningly realistic brutality that was the daily bread of the people knight was.

the patron saint of the Knights of Malta.

The bare-backed executioner bends straight over the dying man and draws his knife to finally separate the Baptist's head from his body after the sword blow and place it in Salomé's golden bowl, an image of frighteningly realistic brutality that was the daily bread of the people knight was.

the patron saint of the Knights of Malta.

The bare-backed executioner bends straight over the dying man and draws his knife to finally separate the Baptist's head from his body after the sword blow and place it in Salomé's golden bowl, an image of frighteningly realistic brutality that was the daily bread of the people knight was.

St. John's Co-Cathedral, which is only canonically subordinate to the Cathedral of St. Paul in the old capital Mdina, seems like an allegory on Malta.

At first glance, the island appears as a scattered outpost of Europe just off the North African coast, an inconspicuous, hilly, sunburnt island with cliffs, stony beaches and a few fertile plains, twenty-seven by fifteen kilometers small, even smaller than Usedom.

At second glance, however, Malta turns out to be a lavishly filled treasury in which six thousand years of human history can be admired in such concentration and continuity as hardly anywhere else on earth - from the testimonies of enigmatic prehistoric cultures to the legacies of the Phoenicians,

Romans and Arabs to the bastions of knightly Christianity and the burnt traces of the recent past.

All of this has been superimposed layer by layer without displacing one another. You can still see, hear and feel all of this, as if history had become geology in Malta.