The sublime darker heritage tourism aspects at St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta

Abstract

At first glance, many churches may not be a primary choice for adherents of dark tourism, particularly those that are small, unadorned, or not architecturally unique. However, churches are repositories of collections of sepulchral art, the burial places of famous people, and where people come to mourn and to understand the meaning of death. Although not part of their core business, managers of churches and similar religious sites have realised that there is a steady and growing number of people who are interested in and willing to pay an entrance fee to enter sacred places and experience their “religious externalisations” of death. Indeed, churches, as a part of the offerings of “dark tourism”, can be considered one of the places where people visit to “construct contemporary ontological meanings of mortality” (Stone, 2012, p. 1565; see Stone, 2010). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the history and death- and memoria-related architecture and design of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Malta (see also Munro, 2005, 2007, 2019). St John’s Co-Cathedral, like many churches and cathedrals in Europe, such as St Denis in Paris, the Temple Church in London, and many churches in Rome, contains stunning sepulchral monuments and burial slabs. St John’s Co-Cathedral, hereinafter referred to as the Conventual church of St John’s, or simply St John’s, was the church of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem—also known as the Order of St John or Order of Malta. St John’s was also the hall of fame, aula heroum, of the Order and the burial place of their Grand Masters and many of their knight. Besides that, it was a place of memory, remembrance and the culture of memoria, to come to terms with the here and the hereafter. All these sepulchres are collectively held in a corpus, at present comprising of over 386 polychrome marble intarsia memorial slabs and some 24 sepulchral monuments, This corpus relates to the Latin inscribed texts, the iconography, the symbolism, and even the meaning of the different kinds of marble used, whereby each slab or monument is a part of the whole, pars pro toto, of the corporate identity of the Order expressed through the corpus (Munro 2005; see Figure 1). After briefly presenting the history of St John’s, attention it turned to discuss its death-related art and architecture in the form of human bones and skulls, sepulchral monuments and burial slabs, before discussing the relationship St John’s has with dark tourism and pilgrimage.