In the pastoral embrace of Gozo, surrounded in equal parts by comforting and vicious waves of the Mediterranean Sea, stands Fort Chambray, a specimen of Anglo-Maltese history, filled with tales of war, glory, strife and resilience.
At their core, the remains of the British barracks in their dilapidated condition act as a poignant example of what Edmund Burke might call the sublime, an appeal to a certain awe-inspiring discomfort, a visual reminder of the vastness and unforgivable character of nature and time.
Although many statements have been made regarding the dismay at the now-approved development plan by those capable of appreciating the significance and beauty of Maltese heritage, the aim of this article is to insert another testimony into the discourse of displeasure, one which engages with the beauty of the ruinous, the decaying, the sublime.
Burke, in his aesthetic treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, asserts that the feeling of the sublime arises from a certain terror, a visceral response of the senses to the obscure and vast nature of an object or phenomenon in question. Their terrible power reminds us of human frailty and entropy, at-once terrifying and inspiring awe, getting a taste of something that is beyond us. It both heightens our soul and crushes it with the reality of our insignificance.
The British barracks can be considered vivid monuments to these sentiments. Their crumbling walls, slowly yet inexorably conquered by the island’s flora – an echoing whisper of a history that is both grand and tragic, recalling an empire’s might and inevitable decline, the preparation for war and, later, hard-earned victory, the beauty of stonemasonry in the name of utility.
Crevices of limestone are coursing with the sublime in their dilapidation and decay, constituting visual testaments to the unstoppable passage of time – with erosion at the hands of the elements and time, they become more than historical sites but, rather, a certain memento mori, a reminder of the ubiquitous temporality of all, especially that of humanity. Glimpsing them propagates a sense of reverence tightly intertwined with a perturbing melancholy of what has been lost to the ages.
The proposed renovation, with its plans for demolition and reassembly of the barracks’ façade into a new structure, threatens to sever this very profound emotional charge imbued within the very walls. Through Burke’s perspective, this act would obliterate the allure of terror and obscurity that make ruinous remains so compelling.
By reconstructing what time has deconstructed, we risk transforming these barracks from a canvas of the sublime into a mere pastiche of dry historical merchandise, devoid of the terror and awe that define the sublime experience of real history.
The cultural and historical narrative of Gozo is intricately woven into these stones- Alisa Arturovna Hewer
The very essence of the project is not merely an act of physical transformation but a bitter delusion about the true value of ruins. It is an act of modern hubris, a painfully accurate representation of a proud world which seeks to commodify rather than humbly respect, seeking to control and revise what nature and time have transformed into sublime art.
The melancholy of the situation is further accentuated by the ethical queries of heritage preservation. The cultural and historical narrative of Gozo is intricately woven into these stones, with each crack and eroded edge of an archway narrating a story of resilience, defeat and the enduring yet ephemeral spirit of those who built, used and abandoned it. The barracks act as a lesson in humility, a reminder of merciless effect of time and nature on humanity’s futile attempts to conquer their world.
There is beauty in this awareness of the beauty of entropy – a notion which becomes alien in our age of narcissistic development and reconstruction. To alter this landscape is to erase the complexity of this narrative, to replace the space of silent poetry of decay with the cacophony of hyper-modern insatiable appetite for profit and power. The sublime is not to be found in the pristine and perfectly preserved, but, rather, in ruins that have borne witness to the sublimity of the passage of decades and centuries.
In conclusion, through advocating for the preservation of the barracks in their current state, one is not merely resisting change or denying the need for economic prosperity. Rather, one is seeking to preserve a rare space where the notion of the sublime can still be encountered, where the weight of history, the vastness and uncontrollable nature of the passage of time can still be encountered. Through such places, we, as temporal beings, are given the privilege of humility – of being made aware of entropy contextualised in the grandeur of the whole, giving us a glimpse of what came before and what will persevere long after we are gone.
Alisa Arturovna Hewer is a research support officer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Malta.