Eyes Down, Spirits High: Malta’s Mega-Tombola Takes Over Valletta in Explosive Night of Nostalgia and €15k Jackpot

Watch: Eyes down, spirits high as thousands flock to tombola night
By our staff reporter

Valletta’s Republic Street echoed with the percussive clatter of thousands of plastic counters on cardboard last Saturday night as Malta’s biggest street tombola drew an estimated 12,000 players—grandmothers clutching rosaries, teenagers Face-timing their numbers, and tourists who thought they’d wandered into an open-air bingo hall. By 9 p.m. the queue snaked past the Triton Fountain; by midnight the jackpot had ballooned to €15,000, and the scent of ħobż biż-żejt and beer mingled with the salt-spray breeze rolling up from the Grand Harbour.

Organised by the Valletta 2018 legacy NGO “Festivals Malta”, the event was billed as a one-off “mega-tombola” to kick off the summer village-fest season, but it felt like a national reunion. “I haven’t played since the Sette Giugno fair in Hamrun, 1994,” laughed 78-year-old Karmenu Zahra, spreading his cards on a collapsible table outside the old Maltacom building. “Back then the prize was a live chicken and a bottle of anisette. Tonight I’m after the cash, but really I’m here for the noise—this is the sound of my childhood.”

That noise—part lottery, part carnival—has deep roots. Tombola, the Maltese cousin of Italian tombola and British housey-housey, arrived with the Knights but mutated into a uniquely island ritual: 90 numbers, three horizontal rows, plastic red counters sold in twisted newspaper cones, and a caller who sings each extraction in rhyming couplets. “Tletin u sitta, mara f’sikkina!” (“Thirty-six, wife with a knife!”) drew whoops and laughter every time it was pulled from the brass drum imported specially from Gozo.

Culture Minister Owen Bonnici, who wandered the street flanked by security and selfie-seekers, insists the night was about more than nostalgia. “After COVID we needed to re-activate public space,” he told Hot Malta. “Tombola is low-cost, inter-generational, and inherently Maltese. One euro buys you twenty counters; nobody is priced out.” Economists agree: street vendors reported record sales—2,500 ftira, 1,800 bottles of Kinnie, and an estimated €50,000 in spontaneous spending that cafés otherwise wouldn’t see on a humid June weekend.

But the real jackpot may be social capital. Marija Camilleri, a youth worker from Żejtun, brought 14 teenagers on a rented minibus. “Some had never been to Valletta after dark,” she said. “They started off scrolling TikTok, but by the time we were one number away from ‘house’ they were screaming ‘Dun Karm, 62!’ like everyone else. That shared adrenaline is community glue.”

Not everyone is convinced the mega-format should become annual. Traditionalists argue that village tombolas—held in band club yards with hand-painted boards and prizes of olive oil and crocheted tablecloths—are being overshadowed. “When the jackpot is €15,000, the neighbourly vibe shrinks,” warned Ċensu Galea, 66, president of the Birkirkara St. Helena band club. “Next week we’ll still be calling numbers under a 40-watt bulb, and we’d like people to come back.”

Still, the sea of faces on Saturday told a different story. Nigerian care-worker Joy Okafor, who has called Malta home for eight years, won a €200 side pot and was promptly lifted onto strangers’ shoulders. “I didn’t understand all the jokes, but I felt the hug,” she grinned, counters still stuck to her sweaty palm. “Tonight I wasn’t a foreigner; I was just the girl who needed 88.”

By 1:15 a.m. the final full-house—number 73, “The pope blesses thee”—was claimed by a Gozitan electrician who immediately announced he’d spend the €15,000 on his daughter’s university fees in London. The crowd dispersed, counters crunching underfoot like confetti. Cleansing crews moved in, but Republic Street kept humming: couples comparing near-misses, teenagers trading counters as souvenirs, elderly men folding chairs while humming the caller’s last rhyme.

In a capital increasingly dominated by cruise-ship schedules and Airbnb rates, tombola night was a rare reminder that Maltese culture isn’t something you consume—it’s something you shout across a crowded street, one ridiculous rhyme at a time. Whether the phenomenon scales up or returns to quiet parish yards, one thing is certain: next time the drums spin, the island will still lean in, eyes down, spirits irrepressibly high.