Desecration tramples into historic Dapitan Kingdom

IT may be just a few more years and an important heritage site that is located at Mansasa and at the Tagbilaran City Strait may be gone for good due to neglect and continuing desecration. When it is lost, only about a handful of people would know that a vital historical goldmine of artifacts and archaeological finds that could detail past Boholano life would be wasted forever.

Mansasa and the banks along Tagbilaran City Strait , history records would say used to be the site of an important community that was once tagged by the Spaniards as the “Venice del Oriente”. Then referred to as Dapitan Kingdom , the city of linear design can be accessed by boats sailing through its waterways like Venice , was an important trading center. Archaeological diggings along it could prove that the place could have allowed the anchoring of western and Asian merchants here, decades before the Spaniards officially set foot in Bohol.

Now the site of a bustling nook of Tagbilaran City, and with its proximity to the highly commercialized districts, house construction, unregulated digging for sewerage systems and ongoing illegal reclamation along the area destroys or buries forever artifacts that have been imbedded in the sands and buried away by the swirling tides of the strait. With a handful of historians fighting for the protection of the site armed with a quaint law, they could only shake their heads on the daily desecration impressed upon the abandoned kingdom.

“Even with existing laws governing built-heritage and archeological sites, there is still a need for local governments to complement it with ordinances to fully place heritage sites under protective pall”, says Commissioner Beatriz Rose Angeles of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). Comm. Angeles, who is in Bohol for the first International Heritage Conference spoke before more than 300 local and foreign heritage keepers and cultural workers gathered at the MetroCenter Hotel May 16-17 to discuss the Philippine State Laws on Built Heritage, one of the topics during the conference.

Commissioner Angeles, who also is a lawyer shared that the country indeed is losing in the fight to keep some of its built heritage owing to neglect and plain indifference. She said that the country has Cultural Properties Preservation and Protection Act (RA 4846) that actually governs the management of important cultural properties, national cultural treasures, archaeological sites, artifacts and hidden treasures. Similarly, she also cited the Philippine Environmental Policy that may be used to stop any destruction of cultural properties and heritage sites.

However, she pressed on the role of local government units in crafting laws that carry out the national provisions so the action of protection can be truly implemented in the local region. Recently, the City Council enacted an ordinance protecting the heritage houses and area of Sitio Ubos. It was not known if a similar move is to be accorded to the shorelines of lower Mansasa, the site of the old Dapitan Kingdom.

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