Pillar 01 · History & Heritage

The History of Żejtun: From Roman Villa to Città Beland

Żejtun is older than most of the towns visitors come to Malta to see, and quieter than all of them. Its name means “olives”. Its grander title — Città Beland — was bestowed in 1797. Between those two facts sits two thousand years of Roman farms, Arab agriculture, parish rivalries, siege bravery, baroque ambition, and a stubborn local memory that has outlasted everyone who has tried to write it down.

This is the orientation page for everything we publish about Żejtun’s past. The deeper articles linked below go into specific churches, palaces, and episodes; this page is the spine that holds them together.

The short version

Żejtun sits on a low ridge in south-eastern Malta, looking down toward Marsaxlokk Bay. People have farmed this ridge since the Bronze Age, but the town as a continuous settlement begins with the Romans, who built a substantial villa here for the production of olive oil. After the Romans came the Arabs, who left the agriculture intact and the place-name behind: Żejtun derives from the Arabic root for olive (zaytūn). Under the Knights of St John, two adjoining hamlets — Bisqallin and Ħal Bisbut — fused into one parish, and that parish became the town we walk through today.

The defining moments are easy to list. The Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman raiding party landed on the south coast and was repulsed before it reached the new capital. The completion in 1720 of Lorenzo Gafà’s parish church of St Catherine, one of the finest baroque interiors in the islands. The grant in 1797, by Grand Master Hompesch, of the title Città Beland — “the noble city” — in recognition of the town’s loyalty. The British arrival, the Second World War, independence in 1964, and the slow, deliberate work since then to keep the historic core a place where people still live, rather than a postcard.

The Roman villa

The Żejtun Roman villa was discovered in 1961 during the construction of a new wing of the local secondary school. Excavations revealed a substantial agricultural villa from roughly the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD, organised — as Roman villas in Malta typically were — around the production and storage of olive oil. The site preserves clear remains of an oil-pressing room (torcularium), water cisterns, and domestic quarters. It is one of only a handful of Roman villas open to the public in Malta and the most accessible of them.

For visitors, the villa matters for two reasons. It anchors Żejtun’s identity as an olive town for two millennia rather than a few hundred years; and it tells you, before you even reach the parish square, that the south of Malta has been continuously productive farmland for longer than most European cities have existed. Our full guide to visiting the villa covers what you can see today, what is still being studied, and the realistic time to allow.

Two villages, one parish

Until the 17th century, what we now call Żejtun was actually two adjoining settlements. Bisqallin grew up around the older parish church of St Gregory; Ħal Bisbut sat slightly to the west. Both were small farming communities with their own chapels and family networks. As the population grew through the 16th and 17th centuries, the two villages effectively merged, and the parish was reorganised around what would become the new church of St Catherine. The street pattern of the historic core still preserves the old village boundary if you know where to look — narrow alleys that don’t quite line up between the two halves of the town.

This isn’t archaeological pedantry. It explains why Żejtun has two important parish churches rather than one (St Gregory’s, the old church; St Catherine’s, the new one), why the band clubs grew up where they did, and why the historic centre has the slightly knotted, two-hearted feel that distinguishes it from a planned town like Valletta. More on the two villages.

The Great Siege of 1565

In July 1565, Ottoman forces landed in Malta to take the islands from the Knights of St John. Most of the fighting was around Birgu, Senglea, and Fort St Elmo, and most modern accounts of the siege focus there. But a substantial Ottoman raiding party did move inland through the south, and Żejtun — as the largest village on that route — was directly in their path.

Local accounts, which the parish has preserved with characteristic stubbornness, record a series of skirmishes around the old church of St Gregory. The Ottoman raiders were eventually repulsed, but the old church bears damage from this episode that you can still trace in its fabric. The Knights remembered: when the new capital, Valletta, was built, the Grand Master ensured that southern villages received continued protection and investment. Some of that investment is what we now call Żejtun’s baroque heritage. More on the siege at Żejtun.

The two parish churches

If you visit only one building in Żejtun, make it St Catherine’s parish church. Designed by Lorenzo Gafà — the most accomplished Maltese baroque architect of his generation — and completed in 1720, it is one of the great interior spaces of the islands. The dome is more restrained than the monumental work Gafà did at Mdina Cathedral, but the proportions are arguably finer; the dome reads as inevitable rather than imposed. The titular statue of St Catherine, the side chapels, and the quiet corner where the Good Friday pageant statues are stored are all worth time. Full guide to St Catherine’s.

The older parish church, dedicated to St Gregory, sits a short walk away in what was once Bisqallin. It is smaller, lower, and unmistakably medieval in its bones, with later baroque additions. Every year on the first Wednesday after Easter, the parish processes from St Catherine’s to St Gregory’s in a tradition that has been observed since 1614 — one of the oldest continuous religious processions in Malta. More on St Gregory’s and the 1614 procession.

The chapels

Beyond the two parish churches, Żejtun has a remarkable density of small votive chapels — buildings that families or guilds erected over the centuries as private acts of devotion. Some are still in use; some are locked most of the year and opened only for their feast day; a few are in private hands. The chapel of St Clement, the chapel of St Nicholas, and the small wayside chapels along the road to Marsaxlokk together form a kind of distributed parish — a way of marking the agricultural land outside the town walls. Our chapel-by-chapel guide.

The palaces

Żejtun is not a town of grand palazzi in the Mdina or Valletta sense; the wealth here was always agricultural rather than aristocratic. But the town does have a small number of significant noble houses. Aedis Danielis — also known as Palazzo Bonici — is the most architecturally ambitious of these, a 17th-century townhouse that has been carefully restored and is occasionally open for guided visits. Villa Cagliares, locally known as It-Tempju, sits slightly outside the town and was originally a hunting lodge built for Bishop Baldassare Cagliares in the early 17th century. Aedis Danielis · Villa Cagliares.

Why Città Beland?

In 1797, Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim — the last Grand Master of the Order of St John before Napoleon’s arrival — granted Żejtun the title Città Beland. The grant placed Żejtun among the small group of Maltese towns recognised with the dignity of a città. The exact reasoning of the grant, and what “Beland” itself refers to, are still discussed locally. Our explainer on the title gives the most likely interpretation and walks through the alternatives.

The olive heritage

The town’s name is its oldest piece of heritage. Żejtun traces back through Maltese to the Arabic root zaytūn — olive — and through Maltese place-names you can still trace the olive economy that gave the south its prosperity for two millennia. Olive cultivation declined sharply in the 19th and 20th centuries, but a recent wave of restoration — small groves replanted with traditional Maltese cultivars, oil pressed locally each autumn — has begun to restore some of that landscape. More on the olive name and the modern revival.

Where to start

If you have one morning in Żejtun and an interest in history, walk from the Roman villa to St Gregory’s, sit for a few minutes in St Catherine’s, and have coffee in the parish square. That gives you the spine of two thousand years in about three hours. If you want a full day’s worth of suggestions, that’s the next pillar over. If you want to come during the festa, the calendar matters — festa week is the best of the town and the worst of the parking.