![]() ![]() ![]() As their name suggests, they are gathering halls for marching bands – a legacy of British military bands – but they’re also social clubs, equipped with bars, pool halls and even a radio station, as well as informal religious links to the church with their own chaplain and chapel.īand clubs in Malta are also the epicentre of the most competitive forms of pika. ![]() We arrived at a building whose beige stone façade was adorned with hundreds of large light bulbs and a draped green banner – the colour favoured by followers of St Sebastian in Qormi.īeneath the banner, Cardona’s fellow St Sebastian supporters were waiting for me, including the president of their association, known in Malta as a ‘band club’.īand clubs are volunteer organisations that are found throughout islands. ![]() (When there is no traffic, Malta can feel incredibly small.) Mario Cardona, a St Sebastian supporter, anthropologist and professor at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, picked me up at my hotel in northern Malta for the 30-minute drive to Qormi, about halfway across the island. Located in central Malta, the town of Qormi hosts an intense rivalry between followers of St George and St Sebastian that has built up a reputation over the past years, and I went to learn why. So I visited one of these towns last November hoping to get a better grasp on the concept. “Various parts of Malta are hotter on the pika register than others,” Cassar had informed me. In recent years, festas have included competing theatre companies and a new record for hoisting 711 flags in a village. To this day, Maltese festa pageantry, artefacts and ornaments take cues from the Baroque style that defined the 17th- and 18th-Century architecture of the Order of St John, such as the hand-held carriage that transports the statue of the saint to the festa’s main stage, and the hand-carved wooden centrepiece for the Sunday feast. Year after year, followers of respective patron saints attempt to outspend and outdo their neighbouring parish in a contentious crusade for showmanship that seems truly fit for the descendants of the Knights Hospitaller, the medieval sect of Catholic warriors from Jerusalem that ruled Malta for about 300 years from 1530. Rivalries have become so intense that festas have had to be partially cancelled, the most recent in 2004, due to the threat of violence. At this time, pika summons the islands’ hot-blooded Mediterranean spirit to the fore, as parishes compete in a paradoxically sacrilegious celebration of the sacred. Every year, Malta’s festa season, when villages celebrate their patron saints by throwing big feasts, peaks between June and September. That these last two events took place so close in time is no coincidence. Yours is the ugliest in Malta’ also an example of pika. Meanwhile, just less than two weeks later, two parishes exchanged sacrilegious insults about their rivals’ Virgin Mary statue – ‘Ours is the most beautiful statue. Pika is also what brought about a man getting hit over the head with a flowerpot, according to the Times of Malta, during a festival in August last year. “Pika is what drove the Maltese in 1958 to tear down and rebuild the Carmelite Basilica that today defines Valletta’s horizon with a 42m-high dome, just to overshadow the Anglican Cathedral next door,” he said. ![]()
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