Ġgantija and Sansuna: How Malta’s Giants Became a Legend

On Gozo, one of Malta's islands, stands a stone complex called Ġgantija. The name comes from "ġgant," the Maltese word for giant. The two temples were built about 3600 to 3200 BCE, when the islanders had no iron and no wheel. Their walls use large limestone blocks, some several metres high. UNESCO lists Ġgantija with Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Skorba, Ta' Ħaġrat, and Tarxien among the world's earliest free-standing stone buildings, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. About thirty major stone structures dot the two islands.

Gozitan tradition says a giant woman named Sansuna built Ġgantija in a very short time while carrying her child and lifting stones on her head. A fuller version of the tale opens on a winter night when a long streak of fire crossed the sky and fell into a nearby valley. Sansuna walked out of the dark, claimed descent from the Nephilim that the Book of Enoch calls the children of the watchers and mortal women, promised to guard the island against pirates, and lifted blocks of more than twenty tonnes as if they were straw. It sounds like a folktale, but it survives because islanders saw something real: immense buildings on a small island, built by a society whose remaining traces do not immediately explain how the stones were moved and raised. Put the legend beside the temples and the underground chambers, and a rumour takes shape. Malta once held a different community, later reduced to "Stone Age farmers" or turned into a story about giants.