Today, Anna, Austin, Drew, Eric, Jeff, Billy, and I went to Mdina with Professor Clark, and met up with Timmy and Keith there. It was the first time at Mdina for the Princeton team as well as the first cistern mapping experience. We were not able to access any of the cisterns right away, so we had around an hour to explore Mdina, which is an ancient medieval city and also the previous capital of Malta. Mdina had a lot of interesting medieval buildings and we were able to look out over the bastion walls at Viletta, and some other cities in Malta.
After we ate lunch at the Fantanella inside Mdina, we went to explore the St. Paul catacombs with Keith as our guide. These ancient catacombs were used for both cremation burials and inhumation burials. We only had around half an hour to look around before the bus had to come pick us up.
We went down into two underground catacomb sections, one which led to three small burial rooms and another that had many passages branching out from it. We learned about the different types of burial spaces used in Malta as well as some of the inscriptions on the tombs and the architecture of the catacombs. We also talked about the pagan and Christian phases of this catacomb as well as compared it to Roman style catacombs. Overall, the tombs were a little creepy, but very cool!
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