Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1465732
NEWS 9 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 24 APRIL 2022 to fit into the void, Vella ven- tured into the passageway with a rope to guide him and a box of matches to light the way. He burned through the matches quickly, lighting one after the other so he could explore the passage. At one point he dropped the box of matches. He went to pick it up, and accidentally brushed his hand against a hu- man skull. The skeletal remains fright- ened him heavily, jolting him to escape the passageway – never to return back to the church. There are some disagree- ments over who discovered the passageway first: graffiti carvings along the wall suggest that two others entered the same skeleton-laden passage- way in 1909, 60 years before Grezzju Vella's own gruesome discovery. This may have been the origin of the local folk tales of "secret passageways" in St Gregory's church. Indeed, the church is shroud- ed in myth and mystery. One such folk tale builds on the Ottoman Empire's last ma- jor attack against Malta, known as "the last attack" (l-aħħar ħbit), when raiders pillaged Że- jtun and neighbouring towns. The story goes that the discov- ered bones could have been the remains of women, children, and elderly who sought shelter and were eventually killed in the church. Ruben Abela points out that there is no documentation cor- roborating this story, but it did serve as inspiration for a ballad penned by Walter Zahra – fa- ther of famed novelist Trevor Zahra – after the passageway was discovered. "Folk can be beautiful, and everyone enjoys it – it fosters nostalgia for the past." This isn't the end of the road for this discovery. "Like other studies this raised more ques- tions than it did answers," Ab- ela remarked. Future studies could adopt DNA testing to determine who these people were, while archaeological en- deavours throughout the rest of the church building could shed further light on its mys- teries. At this stage, the questions around these remains hinge on the identities of the people buried and how their skele- tons ended up in the roof of a church. The current church was built on the site of an older private chapel dedicated to St Mark and St Jacob belonging to the noble Bonici family – could these people have been buried there and eventually placed in this passageway? Could these skeletons have been the re- mains of such noble families? The study was funded through the Small Initiatives Support Scheme established by the Malta Council for the Vol- untary Sector. Debra Camilleri, a senior executive within the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, developed the study through her thesis. Bernardette Mercieca, who also works with the superintendence, studied the human bones and cata- logued them. The study was carried out in collaboration with Heritage Malta's Diagnostic Science Laboratories, under the super- vision of Matthew Grima. nmeilak@mediatoday.com.mt PHOTOGRAPHY JAMES BIANCHI Skulls galore: the skeletons date from the late 15th century to the 19th century, perhaps giving the lie to the folklore of an Ottoman invasion of Zejtun that led to the death of villagers inside the church Below: the inscriptions of two men who first discovered the skeletons