For love of country

For love of country – in Malta, the phrase is never abstract. It echoes from honey-coloured bastions at sunset, flickers on festa fireworks over Għaxaq, and hums beneath every conversation at the village kazin. But what does “love of country” actually look like on an island smaller than most European cities, where everyone knows your nanna’s maiden name and a passport stamp still feels like a small betrayal? Last Sunday, the feast of St George in Qormi gave us the clearest answer in years.

By 6 a.m., the narrow lanes around the parish church were already scented with ħobż biż-żejt and fresh paint; residents had spent the night repainting their doorways in the green and white of their patron saint. Children in starched shirts rehearsed brass-band marches on rooftops, while 87-year-old Salvu Briffa hung an eight-metre tricolor banner that his father first stitched in 1952. “We don’t do this for tourists,” he told me, wiping crimson dust from his fingers. “We do it because the village is our family photo album. If we stop dressing the streets, the memories fade.”

That sentiment ripples far beyond festa season. In the past decade, Malta’s population has swelled by 25%, driven by foreign workers and EU citizens chasing sun and tax breaks. The change has sparked fierce debate about identity, housing prices, and the Maltese language itself. Yet the same influx has also revived certain traditions precisely because locals felt them slipping away. Take the Għanafest folk-singing marathon in Buskett last month: organisers expected 300 attendees, but more than 1,200 turned up, many waving improvised banners that read “Malti mhux mitluf” – Maltese is not lost. The crowd spilled into the pine groves, where grizzled għannejja traded improvised verses with teenagers who’d discovered the art form on TikTok. The result wasn’t nostalgia; it was fusion, a living dialectic between old and new, foreign and familiar.

Love of country also shows up in quieter, stubborn ways. At the Valletta FoodBank, volunteers sort 1.3 tonnes of surplus produce every week, enough to feed 400 families. Coordinator Maria Vella, 34, left a corporate job after watching her hometown of Żejtun transform into a ring of cranes and Airbnb rentals. “Patriotism isn’t a flag on your balcony,” she says, stacking cartons of donated ġbejniet. “It’s asking who can’t afford the cheese we’re throwing away.” Her organisation now partners with restaurants in Paceville once notorious for 4 a.m. waste; chefs compete to create recipes from the day’s leftovers. The initiative has cut restaurant food waste by 38% in six months and inspired copy-cat schemes in Gozo.

Even the environment – long the Achilles heel of a nation that paved paradise for petrol stations – is witnessing a grassroots renaissance. Last winter, 3,000 volunteers planted 4,500 carob and Aleppo pines along the Dingli cliffs after a viral Facebook post pleaded, “Let’s give our children cliffs that don’t crumble.” The hashtag #GħalPajjiżna (For Our Country) trended for days, prompting the Environment Ministry to pledge €1 million in matching funds. Local band Club Anonimi raised €27,000 in a single weekend gig, selling limited-edition T-shirts that read “Love your country like it’s your ex – prove you’ve changed.”

Critics argue these gestures are drops in the Mediterranean, cosmetic fixes in the face of over-development and corruption scandals. Yet they miss the cumulative power of small acts performed in public view, witnessed by neighbours who still borrow each other’s ladders and argue over Eurovision points. When 12-year-old Maya Zammit won the national poetry contest with a piece titled “Jien Maltija, Mhux Passaport” (I’m Maltese, Not a Passport), her school closed for the afternoon so the entire student body could watch her recital on TV. The poem ends: “My country is not the size of my island, but the size of my heart when I share it.”

As fireworks lit up Qormi’s skyline last Sunday, the brass band launched into the national anthem. Phones rose to record the moment, but no one sang louder than the old men who once marched in uniform before Malta was even a republic. Their voices cracked on “Ħares, Mulej, kif dejjem int ħarist” (Protect, Lord, as ever Thou hast protected), and in that crack lived every contradiction of a nation modernising at lightning speed yet clinging to its stories. For love of country, on this island, is not an oath taken once; it is a daily decision to repaint the door, to plant the tree, to feed the stranger, to sing the song. And tomorrow, we do it again.