First Rizal Monument

One of the highlights of our last visit to Camarines Norte (aside from the Pinyasan Festival) was the celebration of our National Hero Jose Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary. Daet figures prominently in this nationwide celebration because it is the site of the first and oldest monument erected in honor of Rizal (though he never set foot in the town) in the country (antedating, by 14 years, the more famous one built in Luneta in 1912) and in the world.

Check out “Pinyasan Festival 2011“

Last June 19, some 1,500 youth of the province, all belonging to various schools and organizations, joined a mass floral offering at the First Rizal Monument, all vowing to keep the libertarian ideals of Rizal alive and to help contribute in nation-building.  A history forum, with Prof. Danilo M. Gerona of the Ateneo de Naga University, was also held there.

Plaque

The monument, at the corner of Justo Lukban and Magallanes Iraya Sts., at Rizal Square, Kalayaan Park (the park was said to be the site where the Katipuneros held their ground during the April 14-18, 1898 uprising), in front of the old municipal hall (now the Daet Heritage Center), is a 3-tiered, 20-ft. high stone pylon designed by Lt.-Col. Antonio Sanz, a soldier-artist and revolutionary head of the local government, and Lt.-Col. Ildefonso Alegre.  It was built through the financial contributions of the townsfolk of Camarines Norte and the Bicol region.  Oral accounts say that the base contains a time capsule containing the list of contributors to the project while some quarters and treasure hunters believe that there were buried treasures around it.

The groundbreaking for the construction of this sparsely decorated but impressive and majestic monument, near the bank of the Daet River, was done on December 30, 1898 (just two years after Rizal’s death), in observance of the first-ever Rizal Day (the first province to do so), decreed on December 20 by then Pres. Emilio Aguinaldo, and completed sometime in February 1899, shortly after the outbreak of the Philippine-American War. Its foundation is believed to have been made with mortar and coral stone taken from the demolished old Spanish jail where many patriots, in April 1898, were tortured and executed. The monument is rather unique as it does not bear a sculpted image of Rizal, unlike other monuments today.

Inscribed on the square podium, surmounted by a two-level triangle (the last one tapering off to a point), are Rizal’s popular novels, “Noli Me Tangere 1886” and “El Filibusterismo 1891,” and “Morga 1889,” a tribute to Antonio de Morga, author of Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, an important book on the Spanish colonization of the Philippines written in 1609 and later annotated by Rizal. Ironically, the Rizal Monument came to be known as “Morga Monument.”  On the sides of the triangle is a five-pointed star, an eight-rayed sun and the Spanish phrase A Jose Rizal (“to Jose Rizal”) and at the top used to be the all-seeing eye.  The front face contains a black metal plaque, from the then National Historical Commission, declaring it a National Historical Landmark in 1961. The monument has pronounced Masonic elements possibly because Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, Sanz, Gen. Vicente Lukban (head of Revolutionary forces in the Bicol Region) and many of the financial contributors were Masons. Today, the image of the First Rizal Monument is incorporated in the provincial and municipal (of Daet) insignias.