Victoria School Reunion: Gozitan Alumni Turn Villa Rundle into Living Yearbook

**Past Victoria school students get together**

The narrow streets of Victoria, Gozo, echoed with laughter last Saturday as more than 200 former students of the town’s government primary school reunited for the first “Ħbieb tal-Iskola Beltin” picnic. Spread beneath the orange trees of Villa Rundle, the gathering turned the usually tranquil garden into a living yearbook: grey-haired architects swapped stories with teachers who had once confiscated their marbles, while toddlers—grandchildren of the class of ’68—chased pigeons through the fountain sprays.

For many, the reunion was less about nostalgia than about reclaiming a space that shaped an island within an island. “In the ’60s, this school was the only place where farm kids, shopkeepers’ sons and the doctor’s daughter sat side by side,” said 72-year-old Ċensa Farrugia, who arrived clutching a 1966 class photo laminated against the drizzle. “We spoke Gozitan at home, learnt Maltese in class and recited English poems at assembly. That mix made us Beltin first, Gozitans second, Maltese always.”

The state primary, officially named Skola Primarja ta’ Rabat but universally referred to as “ta’ belt”, educated generations between 1903 and 1987. Its high-ceilinged classrooms now house the Ministry for Gozo, yet the building’s sandstone façade still bears the nicknames pupils etched with compass points during air-raid blackouts. Organisers of the picnic—three cousins who traced the entire alumni network through parish baptism registers and the electoral roll—say the idea was born during last year’s village festa, when strangers discovered they had shared the same wooden desks, decades apart.

Local band The Creepers provided the soundtrack, segueing from “Ta’ l-Iħmar” to a rocked-up version of “Il-Baħar Madwarna”, the hymn sung every June during the school’s long-abandoned seaside outing to Ħondoq ir-Rummien. Waiters from It-Tokk restaurant circulated trays of ħobż biż-żejt topped with Gozitan capers, while a pop-up stall sold miniature replicas of the old inkwells that children once refilled from a communal porcelain well in the corridor.

Mayor Samuel Azzopardi dropped by with a proclamation declaring the first Saturday of May “Skola Beltin Day”. “Heritage isn’t just bastions and cathedrals,” he told the crowd. “It’s also the memory of ink-stained fingers and the fear of Sister Beniamina’s ruler.” The council has pledged €5,000 to digitise report cards and class photos found in a dusty storeroom, ensuring that even emigrants in Melbourne and Toronto can click their way back to 1973.

Psychologist and former student Dr Marilyn Attard believes such reunions serve a therapeutic role in a community where 42 % of young people now leave for Malta or beyond. “When identities feel fragmented, revisiting a shared physical space re-grounds us,” she explained, watching 80-year-old ex-headmaster Joe Portelli patiently teach an eight-year-old how to play “passju”, the chalk-box game banned in the 1970s for being “too rowdy”.

By sunset, the picnic had raised €3,620 through donation buckets shaped like old lunch tins. The funds will restore the cracked 1958 ceramic mural depicting the Gozo coat of arms that still hangs in the former entrance hall, now a government corridor tourists rarely enter. As organisers packed away bunting sewn from recycled school uniforms, cousins joked that next year they’ll need a bigger park—proof that, in Victoria, the smallest island can still produce the largest classrooms of memory.