Xlen | Have Bag, Will Travel

The problem with an A to Z project is that it starts off easy enough through the vowels and the popular letter but towards the end becomes more difficult. I was worried about X, I thought about cheating and using Extramadura or Eixample in Barcelona but then I suddenly remembered the island of Gozo

Thank goodness for the impenetrable Maltese language: Wiki describes it thus – “Maltese is a Semitic language spoken by the Maltese people. Maltese is a Latinised variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect during the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091.”

All very interesting but the important thing for my A to Z project is that the Maltese language doesn’t object to using the letter X.

In 2015 I went on an open top bus tour of the island of Malta and one of the stop offs was the seaside town of Xlendi. I would like to be able to tell you that it was a delightful and interesting place but sadly I can’t. For some reason ( which I am glad of now) I took this picture of an apartment block on the seafront.

There is another village on Gozo that begins with X and this is interesting.

The village of Xewkija is a modest place but has an enormous church with what is claimed to be the fourth or perhaps even the third largest unsupported church dome in the World.

To put that into some sort of perspective the largest is St Peter’s in Rome (fourth largest city in Western Europe) and the second largest is St Paul’s in London (population 7.5 million, give or take a thousand). Xewkija is a village in rural Gozo with a population of about three thousand, three hundred people. They didn’t have Christopher Wren to design it or Michelangelo to do the interior decoration – they built it themselves!