Welcome to St George’s Basilica, known as “the Golden Church of Gozo”, which rises at the very heart of the island. While inviting you to tour the church to appreciate the artistic and historical treasures within, we would kindly request you not to disturb worshippers in what remains primarily a place of worship.

A basilica is a church whose importance is acknowledged by Rome, the centre of the Roman Catholic Church. It was Pope Pius XII who, in 1958, raised St George’s to the dignity of basilica. There was a time when, as the first parish of Gozo, it served the whole Christian community of the island of Gozo.

This history of this church is entwined with the Christianisation of Gozo. After having survived a dramatic shipwreck in AD 60, the Apostle St Paul established Christianity in these islands, and eventually the whole islands were Christianised. This growth was helped in no small way by the settlement of Byzantine Christians who came with their priests and brought with them their favourite saints. These saints included the Most Holy Virgin and the Great Martyr George. By the sixth century St George was very popular throughout the Mediterranean and most probably it was around this time that the Gozitans started to hail him as their holy protector. They dedicated their church to him: the temple where you stand.

Here the passage of time unfolds in millennia and it flows through prehistoric temples, Phoenician deities, Roman ruler worship, Islamic salat, Jewish canticles and, over the last two thousand years, through various forms of Christian liturgy. Why various forms? Because for well over fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the walls of this church echoed to the chants of the Eastern rite and it was only in the mid-sixteenth century that the Latin form of worship brought this parish in line with the rest of the Church in Malta and Gozo.

To be sure, the walls of the church as you view them rose only towards the end of the seventeenth century (1672-1678). But they were preceded by others that supported lower arches and provided lesser shelter for what was, after all, a tiny population by comparison with today’s thirty thousand inhabitants of Gozo.