Pillar 01 · History & Heritage

Bisqallin and Ħal Bisbut: The Two Villages That Became Żejtun

Żejtun reads as one town, but its bones are two — the older settlement of Bisqallin around what is now St Gregory’s, and Ħal Bisbut a short walk to the west. The seam between them is still legible if you know where to look.

This article is a stub. We’ll expand it with a proper map and a walking route once we have the photographs and the council’s permission to point at specific houses.

Two settlements, one parish

Until the 17th century, what we now call Żejtun was a pair of adjoining hamlets. Bisqallin was the older of the two, grown up around the medieval parish church of St Gregory; Ħal Bisbut sat slightly to the west, with its own street pattern and chapels. Both were small farming communities tied to the surrounding olive groves and grain fields. As the population grew through the 16th and 17th centuries, the two villages grew into each other and the parish reorganised around the new church of St Catherine, completed in 1720.

The street pattern of the historic core still preserves the old village boundary if you walk slowly. Narrow alleys that don’t quite line up. A run of lower facades against a run of slightly grander ones. The way the band-club premises are sited at the seam rather than at a single centre. [LOCAL FACT — Mattew to confirm the precise streets that mark the historical seam, and whether the council’s signage has been updated.]

Why this still matters

The two-villages-one-parish history is not antiquarian. It still shapes how Żejtun functions today. The two band clubs are sited in a way that reflects the old village geography. The Easter Wednesday procession from St Catherine’s to St Gregory’s is, at the level of urban form, a procession from the new village back to the old one. The festa logistics — which streets get decorated by which club, where the apostle statues are placed, how the music carries through the historic core — all encode the older settlement pattern. Once you know the seam runs through the town, you start to see it everywhere, and the town becomes more legible as a result.

What this article will cover

  • What the two place-names mean and where the etymologies actually land
  • A short walking route along the seam, with five things to look for
  • Why Żejtun has two parish churches and how the parishes consolidated
  • How the two-village past still shapes the band-club rivalry and festa logistics
  • The agricultural land that surrounded both villages and what survives of it

Read more on this pillar

Part of our History & Heritage pillar. Pair this with St Gregory’s church, St Catherine’s church, and our architectural reading guide.

Mattew Cassar

Resident · Writer

Mattew writes zejtun.com from a flat above his grandfather’s old workshop on Triq San Girgor. He has lived in Żejtun for twenty-three of his thirty-one years.