The Notarial Archives: Rising from the ashes

The Notarial Archives: Rising from the ashes

It seems as though I’ve caught the Notarial Archives at a good time in their – long, but latterly not-so-illustrious – life. Stepping into the somewhat creaky entrance to meet an enthusiastic staff made up of both professionals and volunteers, I get a sense that the place is on an upswing… in every way. 

What was previously described as a “monument of shame” – owing to the dilapidated state of the St Christopher Street premises where the Archives are housed, but more so to the fact that such a precious resource was allowed to get to that state in the first place – has now been transformed into a vibrant hub of activity, with volunteers of all ages, and from all walks of life, stepping in to ensure the archives are at their best. 

These efforts have been galvanised in large part thanks to Joan Abela, who, as member of the Notarial Archives consultative council, has been waging a steady war against the neglect and mediocrity that has characterised the approach towards the archives up until the early noughties. 

During my first visit to the multi-level St Christopher Street enclave, Abela shows me a mournful slide show of what the Archives were like before she stepped in. It is not, indeed, a pretty picture: binders of aging archives lumped together on rickety shelves, like dusty memorabilia… 

“This is where our Kantilena was found! Can you imagine that?” Abela tells me, the indignation still very fresh. 

But the archives’ importance isn’t just down to key, ‘celebrity’ documents like the Kantilena – the poem, oldest known literary text in Maltese, attributed to Pietru Caxaru, which was rightly given press fanfare upon discovery and restoration. Rather, what the archives also reveal are the nitty-gritty details of life in the past. Because, as Abela pointedly reminds me, everyone went to a notary at some point.

“Basically, every person, from each stratum of society, went to the notary. From the slave, the farmer, the nobleman, the bishop, the grandmaster… therefore, you have a representation of the whole of society, actually held between the beautiful bindings of these volumes,” Abela says of the collection which stretches back some 600 years in history.

This isn’t like the official archives of the Order, Abela goes on, where you have the Grandmaster and his officials noting down what is of historical importance to only the higher-ups. 

“What we have here is the voice of the people. And not just the voice of the people, but the voice of people on the margins of society. Slaves, for example… and women. Where are women in our history? They have a voice here – you can study the history of women through the legal persona they had in different times.”

This is why the notarial archives are called “the mother of all archives,” Abela adds. “Because they hold this beautiful treasure representing all of our society.”

Speaking to Keith Francis German, Notary to Government, one gets a sense that the Archives aren’t just of ‘pure’ historical importance, but carry bona fide legal heft. 

“This is a living archive,” German tells me, reminding me that another building in Mikiel Anton Vassalli Street in Valletta supplements the St Christopher Street Archives. 

“It’s a living archive in the sense that – contracts are required every day. Even for the ‘root of title’, legally, a notary has to come to the archives practically every day to search through contracts made by other notaries. And even in terms of the general public today – it’s become something of a trend among people nowadays to research into their family history, for example… this is over and above their historical relevance, of course,” German says.

German however adds that conservation is of primary concern to the Archives, and in fact Abela tells me that one of the first things she saw to after finally securing some funds – thanks, in large part, to a sponsorship with HSBC – was to hire professional book restorers and conservators. 

In fact, priorities are important to Abela. Remember the creaky entrance I mentioned above? 

“We could have used our injection of funds to just implement cosmetic changes, but we didn’t want to do that. So we chose to invest in manpower instead.”  

And it’s not just the convivial atmosphere at the Archives that bears this out. Having had the opportunity to chat to some of the Archives’ in-house researchers, I also get a sense of the tangible benefit the Archives have on their work. 

Agreeing with Abela’s characterisation of the Archives as a place where “the voice of the people” is allowed to come out, researcher Gabriella Cauchi said that the Archives were instrumental in providing her with invaluable insights for her work on historical funerary rites – in particular with regard to how women approached the matter. 

Similarly, historian Liam Gauci, whose is currently concluding a new book on Maltese corsairs, was grateful to the Archives for endowing his work with the necessary “colour of history”. 

With this amount of goodwill already present at the Archives’ headquarters, it’s difficult to imagine that Abela’s desire to morph the place into a “centre of excellence” won’t in fact come to pass soon enough.