St George's Chapel is one of the oldest structures in Birżebbuġa. Its exact origins are unclear, but records confirm it was already standing by 1565. A decade later, the papal inquisitor Pietro Dusina visited from Rome and found it completely abandoned, just a wooden door, a modest altar, no priest and no income. Over the next few decades, it was restored, fell into disuse, was restored again, deconsecrated in 1659, brought back to life in 1682, fell dormant once more, and was finally restored again in 1907. For a small chapel on a quiet bay, it has survived an extraordinary amount of neglect.
Above its door, a Latin inscription reads NON GODE L'IMMUNITA ECCLESIAS, meaning the chapel offered no sanctuary to criminal offenders seeking asylum within its walls. At a time when churches across Malta routinely sheltered fugitives, this one explicitly did not. Then in 1714, the Knights of St John built a military fortification directly around it. The Knights were a Catholic military order drawn exclusively from European noble houses who ran Malta as their own domain for over two centuries, and explicitly barred Maltese people or nobility from membership.
The ancient chapel was simply absorbed into the needs of another occupying force, q sacred space and defensive wall fused into the same limestone structure, the needs of ordinary Maltese life folded once again into somebody else's architecture. It has been that way ever since, looking out over the bay where fishermen still moor their boats today.
