Mellieħa parish church, art and architecture

Abstract

This dissertation is one of the requisites as part fulfilment of my B.A (Hons) in History of Art. Coming from Mellieħa, I asked if I could write my dissertation about the Mellieħa parish church and its artistic treasures. Nothing academic had been written about this and so it proved a problem as I could not get any information from this source. Although nothing academic existed I got a lot of information from first hand sources and documentation found in the church archives. My main idea behind this dissertation is to show the interest which the residents for the last 150 years for religion through the church and the artistic works there. I found that if it had not been for the continuous work by the past parish priests, Mellieħa would not have the church there is today. The sources are fragmented as there is no centralised depository of documents and so I had to do everything from scratch. Most of the information was gleaned from the church archives but the remainder was kindly made available to me by Mr Jimmy Muscat who had done some research about the church. Another source of information was the Mellieħa newsletter which is not academic but it lead me on to find certain documentation for my work. Talking with the descendants of those who played a part in building and enriching the church through various ways showed that the villagers were an essential element in the development and embellishment of the church. A living archive, Don Mosé Debono helped me in building up a pool of information through his deep knowledge of village history especially that connected with the church. My satisfaction lies in the fact of building an academic study of an important part of the life of Mellieħa. I hope that through my work I opened the way for others to delve deeper into such an interesting subject. While working on my dissertation I realised that the love and interest the villagers of Mellieħa had for the church has not abated but is still alive. As a result of this continued interest my study continues up to the last years of the 20th century clearly showing that interest in the church is still vibrant.