Most cultures, however distant from each other or antithetical, celebrate birth and death. The passage from life to afterlife, from existence to non-being, has, from time immemorial, been seen as a milestone requiring special status and concern. For agnostics, death represents the end of a short journey, for believers, the beginning of an eternal one.

The cappella ardente set up in St John’s Co-Cathedral as part of the funeral celebrations of Pope Pius X in 1914.

Virtually every society contemplates with utmost aversion the summary ditching of a human corpse. The presence in Malta of organised cemeteries in Punic, Roman and medieval times, often with elaborate ledger stones and grave furniture, witness the centrality of death in the thread of Maltese history.

We don’t know much about the funerary rituals of the early inhabitants of the island but believe it would be safe to assume that each age had some rites and dignified ceremonial to say the final goodbye. They solemnised the hope, if not the belief, in a future.

From my collections, I am selecting a representative set of images of funerals since photography started in the 1840s – from grand affairs of state, like celebrations of a monarch’s or a pope’s death, to the passing of anonymous soldiers and sailors, away from their homes and families; from powerful ministers to victims mowed out of existence by political violence, funerals at sea and village farewells, all accompanied by varying degrees of pomp and pageantry, sometimes by leaden and mournful music, always by prayers, blessings, invocations, solemn tolling of bells and tributes of flowers, as emotive and transient as life itself.

Funeral of Isobel Addey Tate, January 30,1917. Tate (b. 1875) was one of the many female doctors serving in the military hospitals in Malta in World War I. All images from the author’s collection

Funeral obsequies in St John’ Co-Cathedral on the death of Mgr Enrico Dandria, July 1932.

A 1920s Roman Catholic military funeral at the Capuchin cemetery, Kalkara. Photo: Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar

The coffin of Governor Sir Walter Congreve on a gun carriage for burial at sea in 1927.

A military funeral passing through a village in the 1920s.

Imposing but unidentified military funeral, probably at the Mile End, 1930s.

Funeral in Floriana, 1920s. Photo: Chritien Studio

A funeral party landing at the Marsa end of Grand Harbour, 1920s.