What I Saw In Taxien

No, I'm not done yet.

Tarxien Temples (pronounced Tarsheen) (€6.00). 

This was lame really.  You get a laminated guide at the start (which I missed and had to go back for), and then you follow a walkway to various lettered points and stare at bits of old stone.  The ruins are so, well, ruined, that it is almost impossible to use The Imagination to see what this once was.  The guide mostly says ‘here is a thing that we don’t know what it is’ so isn’t exactly enlightening. 

Looking at a map of the temple on the back of the guide helped make the lumps of stone actually take a kind of shape and showed which bits were rooms and doors. 

Entrance to a chamber, with entrance to a further chamber behind.

This helped a lot, so it probably wasn’t a genius idea to have it put on the last page rather than the first.  The walk out of the temple was a lot more interesting than the walk in. 

Me with The Niece and huge ‘fat lady’ statue (replica, original at Archaeology museum in Valletta - boy am I glad I went there first):

What may or may not be steps:

Apparently they are too narrow to be steps, so it might just be a pile of rock.

A big pot that, yup, they don’t know what it was for:

Some interesting holes (The Niece suggested the square one was their catflap):

Altar:

Carving of what may be cattle:

Yet again, this place was full of building works.  I didn’t go anywhere in Malta that wasn’t.  Maybe in a few years this place will be a lot more attractive. 

I decided not to see any of the other temple sites after this as no matter how historically important these sites are, they still just look like piles of rocks.