Byzantine Sites in Malta: Explore Rock-cut Tombs and Underground Burial Halls

Byzantine sites in Malta include the underground burial spaces of St Paul’s Catacombs at Rabat. Their connected corridors, canopied tombs and gathering halls preserve a cemetery that developed over several centuries and remained in use during Byzantine rule. The substantial rock-cut interiors provide the main focus here, with burial architecture and spaces associated with commemorating the dead.

The complex began before the Byzantine period. Its later use continued within an inherited cemetery, so individual tomb forms should not all be assigned a Byzantine construction date.

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St Paul’s Catacombs: interconnected burial chambers

St Paul’s Catacombs contain passages linking groups of underground tombs. The main complex extends across more than 2,000 square metres, within a wider cemetery outside ancient Melite. Its surviving chambers combine several burial arrangements rather than a single repeated tomb design.

Canopied tombs stand prominently along the principal corridors. Four arches supported by pillars frame each burial structure, all carved from the surrounding rock. These open architectural frames differ from the smaller enclosed chambers elsewhere in the complex. Corridors and shared spaces connect the graves.

Burial halls and commemorative meals

Two large halls at the entrance contain circular rock-cut tables set on low platforms. Their form recalls the reclining arrangements used for meals in Roman houses. They are generally interpreted as places for commemorative meals associated with the dead, although the precise ceremonies cannot be reconstructed from the stone fittings alone.

The tables were carved directly from the living rock. Their form belongs to the cemetery’s longer late antique history rather than a securely dated Byzantine building campaign.

Continued burial and a later Christian shrine

Burials continued into the seventh century and possibly the eighth, connecting the inherited cemetery with Byzantine Malta.

A separate phase of Christian reuse took place around the thirteenth century, when an existing open space was recut as a shrine and decorated with murals. That painted shrine is medieval, later than the cemetery’s Byzantine occupation.

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