Is there much that man does not find excuses to celebrate? Anything joyous, remarkable, fortunate, jubilant is, and has always been, good reason to encroach on the boredom of routine and gain hearty political mileage – some panem and plenty of circenses.
From this feature are excluded communal events and festivities already covered, like carnivals, visits by royalty and funerals. Religious festivities which, at least up to relatively recently, accounted for the lion’s share of popular pageantry, may form the subject matter of some future feature.
Included, but very summarily, just to give a foretaste, are military parades, political triumphalism and the inevitable rejoicings following sports’ successes. These have in common the spontaneous participation of crowds of fans, well-wishers or simply curious, often choreographed with loud music, illuminations, decorations and fireworks, worthy though unwitting successors of the bacchanalia and saturnalia of Roman times. The kukkanja, the ġostra, the Imnarja (luminaria) the qarċilla and the parata, in essence, represented scaled-down popular versions of bon-ton entertainment, to satisfy public craving for what today lumps under the name of partying.
We know that, at the times of the Order, almost everything turned into an excuse to celebrate publicly on a grand scale – races of quadrupeds, musical concerts, crowds, decorated floats, fountains of free-flowing wine, jousts and tournaments, banqueting, declamations of flattering verse, revelry, masks, dancing, ritual thanksgivings and fireworks.
The election of new grand masters or popes, coronations of Catholic monarchs, weddings of kings, births of heirs to the throne, an armistice, a successful naval encounter and the return of triumphant vessels, visits by foreign ambassadors, the consecration of a new church, the end of a pestilence, arrivals from Rome of important relics or some korpu sant – even public executions of criminals – all turned into admirable reasons for communal celebration or jubilation.