Carnival in Gozo
by Pierre Mejlak

Carnival Week is undoubtedly one of the most colourful events in the Maltese calendar. Traditionally preceding Lent, Carnival provides five days of revelry with many dressing up in colourful costumes and covering their faces with masks in the many towns and villages. Gozo organizes its edition of the festivity.

The main activities take place in It-Tokk, the main square in Gozo's capital Victoria and in Nadur Square. But a particular event, which takes place in Nadur, defies the official definition of a standardised Carnival activity such as those held in Valletta and Victoria. Nadur is one of the villages of Gozo with a long tradition of spontaneous carnivals. Indeed this event has attained such renown locally that parties of university students annually participate as part of anthropological fieldwork! The novelty of the Nadur Carnival is that there is no organising committee to plot out its course. Thus it retains an essentially popular character.

In Nadur the purposes of costume is disguise, in other words, simply not to be recognised. Consequently grotesquely disguised crowds overrun the streets; the costumes consisting mainly of haphazard, coarse guises made of sack, sheets, wigs and incongruous make-up. The local participants are often silent for most of the time in order to make sure that they remain unidentified - so much so that is sometimes referred to as the Silent Carnival. The floats lose much of the grandeur, which the Valletta carnival accords them, and are often no more than carts released from their ubiquitous role on the farms and brought to the streets of Nadur.

Within this absurd set-up it is not uncommon to catch sight of placards with ambiguous, snide remarks daubed in paint directed at both private and public personalities, which in order to avoid being regarded as libellous are often veiled reference, very difficult to gauge for first-time visitors.

Photo courtesy of www.june29th.com