Mdina

The plateau where Mdina stands has been inhabited since prehistory. A Phoenician colony called Ann was established here around the 8th century BC, and after the Romans took it during the Punic Wars it became Melita, or Melite, the name that survives as that of the island. The Punico-Roman city was about three times the size of today's Mdina and reached far into modern Rabat. Christian tradition holds that the Roman governor Publius met the shipwrecked St Paul here and later became Bishop of Malta.

In 870 the Byzantine town was besieged and taken by the Aghlabids; its people were massacred and its churches looted, and marble from them went into the ribat at Sousse in Tunisia. The site was resettled in 1048 or 1049 by Muslims from Sicily, who built a smaller walled town called Madina, from which the present name comes, and the rest of the old city became the suburb of Rabat. Mdina stayed the capital until the Knights of St John arrived in 1530 and chose Birgu instead.

Decline followed, then revival. The 1693 Sicily earthquake badly damaged the city and partly destroyed the cathedral, which Lorenzo Gafà rebuilt in Baroque style; it was consecrated in 1702. From 1722 Grand Master Vilhena had the French engineer Charles François de Mondion renew the city, adding a new gate and the Vilhena Palace. On 10 June 1798 the French took Mdina with little resistance, but on 2 September a Maltese uprising broke out here; the next day the rebels entered through a sally port and killed the 65-man garrison, beginning the two-year revolt that ended French rule. From 1883 to 1931 a railway linked the city to Valletta.

Mdina remained the centre of the Maltese nobility and of the Church after the Knights left, and property is still largely passed down within families from generation to generation. Because it never regained the importance it had before 1530, locals and visitors alike came to call it the Silent City, il-Belt Siekta; the ban on cars keeps it quiet. Its architecture is an unusual mix of Norman and Baroque, and most of its palaces are private homes.

The cathedral is the seat of the Archdiocese of Malta, a role shared since the 19th century with St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, so Mdina keeps a central place in the island's religious life. During the 1798 uprising the Maltese National Assembly met in the city's Banca Giuratale. A local legend from the Great Siege of 1565 tells how, after a nun's vision, the townspeople paraded around the walls for hours to make the Ottomans believe the city was full of defenders.

The city has also become a film set. In the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones it stood in for King's Landing, with Mesquita Square used for one of the series' locations and the Baroque gate appearing in the third episode. Mdina is on Malta's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status and is one of the country's main tourist attractions.

Only 242 people lived inside the walls in July 2024, 76 of them foreign nationals, and the city has never spread beyond its ancient fortifications. Daily life in Mdina is therefore that of a very small, very old neighbourhood that is also one of the main tourist attractions in the country.

The ordinary business of life — shops, schools, buses and most places to eat — is next door in Rabat, a town of about 12,300 people that grew from Mdina's medieval suburb. Rabat holds the Apostolic Nunciature to Malta, and parts of the films Munich and Black Eagle were shot there. Buses from Valletta take about half an hour. Inside the walls it takes less than ten minutes to walk from one end of the city to the other. Residents of Mdina live with restrictions that most towns do not have: only a limited number of residents' cars may enter, alongside emergency vehicles, wedding cars and horses — and visitors leave their cars outside.

Mdina has few places to eat of its own, and the food of a visit is largely that of Rabat and of Malta in general. The everyday snack is the pastizz, a savoury pastry filled with ricotta (tal-irkotta) or curried peas (tal-piżelli). Maltese bread, a crusty sourdough usually baked in wood ovens, is made into ħobż biż-żejt: rubbed with tomatoes or tomato paste, drizzled with olive oil and filled with tuna, olives, capers, onion, bigilla and ġbejna, the small sheep's-milk cheese.

At the table, stuffat tal-fenek, stewed rabbit, is often called the national dish, and aljotta is a fish broth with garlic, herbs and tomatoes. During Lent fish such as lampuki and dishes such as stuffed artichokes, qaqoċċ mimli, were traditional. The Fontanella Tea Garden inside the walls serves cakes and desserts. Kinnie, the bittersweet soft drink made from bitter oranges and extracts of wormwood since 1952, has a reputation as Malta's favourite non-alcoholic drink.