“A giantess who raised the great stone temple with a baby at her breast, hauling megaliths on her head.”
On the Xagħra plateau of Gozo stand two temples older than the pyramids, raised around 3600 BC from limestone blocks no ordinary crew should have been able to move. The islanders had an answer: Sansuna, a giantess who carried the megaliths herself, an infant slung at her shoulder as she worked. The name the site still bears — Ġgantija, from ġgant, the Maltese word for giant — is the legend written straight into the map.
Folk memory insists she was no ravening ogress but a labouring mother, sustaining her impossible work on nothing richer than fava beans and honey — plain water, in some tellings. She is said to have hauled the stones more than four kilometres to the plateau, setting them up as her own place of worship, to call down rain and fertility on the island. Where archaeology sees a Neolithic mystery, Gozo remembered a woman's work.
The Legend
The story as Gozitans tell it begins with a giantess of Xagħra who bore a child to a mortal man of the common people. Neither ogress nor omen, Sansuna simply set to work: with the infant hanging from her shoulder she carried the great stones on her head — some fetched from more than four kilometres away — and raised them into walls that still stand five and a half thousand years later, using the finished temples as her own places of worship.
What the legend lingers on is her diet. Sansuna performed her colossal labour fuelled by nothing but fava beans and honey — humble fare for supernatural strength, and in some versions the honey becomes plain water. She built, tradition says, to summon rain and fertility to a dry island. A rival strand of the tale credits a whole race of giants with raising the walls as a defence, but it is the working mother the island chose to remember.
The Record
The tale attaches to a real and extraordinary place. The Ġgantija complex was raised around 3600 BC, which makes it more than 5,500 years old — the world's second-oldest surviving man-made religious structure, younger only than Göbekli Tepe — and it has stood on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1980. The Sansuna story itself is no modern flourish: it entered the record in the historical work on Gozo by the chronicler De Soldanis.
Ġgantija's true builders remain nameless Neolithic farmers, and that vacuum is precisely what the giantess fills. Folklorists note the pattern is continental: giant-builder legends cling to megalithic monuments in the Netherlands, Wales and Sardinia too — wherever prehistoric stones outlasted all memory of the hands that raised them, tradition supplied larger hands. On Gozo the supplied hands belonged, distinctively, to a nursing mother.
The Lore
The site's name preserves the belief outright: Ġgantija derives from ġgant, the Maltese for giant — glossed locally as the giantess's tower. Long before archaeology, the toponym did the explaining, and the legend served as the island's account of genuine Neolithic engineering: how megaliths of impossible weight came to stand on a plateau's edge without wheels, cranes or iron. The answer was a woman who did not need them.
The details are what make her endure. The diet of fava beans and honey — a giantess fuelled on peasant food — roots the colossus in Gozitan farm life, and the nursing child makes the island's greatest monument a work of motherhood rather than conquest. Sansuna remains a fixture of Maltese folklore and of every telling of Ġgantija's story, the rare builder-legend in which a wonder of the ancient world is also somebody's mother at work.
Field Notes
- ✦ The name Ġgantija derives from ġgant, Maltese for giant — the legend is written into the site's name.
- ✦ A folk explanation for genuine Neolithic megaliths: the temples were raised c. 3600 BC, before the pyramids.
- ✦ Said to have worked fuelled only by fava beans and honey — plain water in some tellings.
- ✦ Carried the stones more than four kilometres, with her half-giant child slung on the other shoulder.
- ✦ Ġgantija has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980; the story was recorded by the chronicler De Soldanis.
Case File
- Classification
- Giantess
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Xagħra, Gozo
- First Sighted
- Gozitan oral tradition
- Habitat
- The plateau of Xagħra, Gozo
- Reported Size
- Colossal giantess
- Also Known As
- Gozo giantess · Il-Ġganta