The Ottoman Muslim cemetery in Malta

Abstract

I have to confess that ever since I was a young child, the local Ottoman Muslim cemetery has been a source of boundless fascination and imagination, an architectural imagery that would embed itself in my mind and consciousness. While driving past it, as a passenger in the back-seat of my father’s humble Fiat Cinquecento, it had then appeared to me as some fantastical and exotic palace with fairy-tale towers, inhabited by wealthy princes and members of royalty, totally unlike anything else that I had ever seen around me. But as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written in The Little Prince, ‘sometimes there’s no harm in postponing your work until later’. And some forty-five years later, now as an architect and architectural historian, it was high time to revisit the subject of my childhood fascination. [excerpt from the Preface]