Home > Kahindik-hindik > get in touch with NHI Chair Ambeth Ocampo on Jose Rizal’s house painted green

get in touch with NHI Chair Ambeth Ocampo on Jose Rizal’s house painted green

June 19, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments
jose rizals' house painted green. scanned from PDI photo.

jose rizals' house painted green. scanned from PDI photo.

these are the comments printed in that news article. we agree completely with the comments. all filipinos should speak up and get the NHI to bring back the glory to jose rizal’s house.

“The house symbolizes Rizal and [the paint job] is an insult to his memory,” she said.

“That’s all we have here in Calamba, and we’ve lost our symbol,” Lazaro said in expressing worry over losing the city’s main historical and tourist attraction.

“It’s embarrassing,” she said. “We are having a hard time explaining to [guests] why it is green.”

Lazaro said it was different in the pre-green days: “Children would turn quiet upon entering the house. There was a certain ambiance and romance, it being an old house.”

She said this was contrary to a reaction from another recent guest who referred to the shrine as “a toy house.”

Another resident said Rizal’s house now looked “like a cake.” Lazaro said teachers on a tour of Calamba were “angry that they lost credibility before their students” in showing the national hero’s supposed representation of home.

NHI Chair Ambeth Ocampoget in touch with NHI Chair Ambeth Ocampo:

  • NHI Telephone Number: 525-7695 (Melanie is secretary; Troy is assistant to the secretary)
  • email: aocampo@ateneo.edu
  • Ateneo De Manila University: 426-6001 ext, 5240 or 5241
Categories: Kahindik-hindik Tags: , ,
  1. Dr. Ambeth R. Ocampo
    June 19, 2009 at 2:24 pm
    Reply

    Thank you for having strong feelings about the preservation of our heritage.
    Before you see red while seeing Rizal’s house in green we hope you can at least read the reasons for the change:

    http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090603-208524/Why-Rizals-house-turned-green

    People who have complained demand restoration of the house to the “original” color but then the funny part here is that the NHI HIstorical Preservation division before repainting the house scraped off layers of paint from a part of the house and, believe it or not, the green everyone hates today happens to be the “original” color when the reconstructed house was opened to the public 50 years ago.

    Perhaps it is the shock of the old rather than shock of the new.

    Dr. Ambeth R. Ocampo
    Chairman
    National Historical Institute

    • wawam
      June 20, 2009 at 10:17 am
      Reply

      posted here: http://wawam.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/is-rizal-turning-green-in-his-grave/

      ambeth ocampo, chair of the NHI is “the idiot who painted rizal’s house green” and that is a quote from the column he wrote on the PDI on the topic on june 3.

      in his reply, aside from acknowledging he is the idiot who did it, he also knows rizal’s house was painted with the ” green color everyone hates” .

      while in his reply to wawam.wordpress he says they scraped off the paint and found out the “original” color of the house was green, this trivia was not mentioned in his june 3 column. we wonder why this was mentioned only now.

      but let’s say they did find green after they scraped it – the june 3 column did say the “Rizal Shrine is not the original home of the National Hero. It is not covered by the same rigid conservation principles applied to a 19th century house. The present Rizal Shrine is but half a century old, having been reconstructed by Juan Nakpil in the 1950s and funded by donations from schoolchildren.”

      that begs the question, when they scraped it, they were not really scraping the real house of rizal. they scraped the house that someone else imagined to be rizal’s house. so using this argument as reason for painting it green may not hold water, or paint.

      based on what he knows and those written in his june 3 column, the best conclusion is that we do not know what was the color of rizal’s house. and yet he knows the green color that is there right is one that everyone hates.

      he writes in his column historical sites like those of rizal should “inform, educate and inspire”. this green color certainly does not “inspire” at all. what it does is it makes us want to puke.

      the education part is also questionable since this part seem to be just on the trivial pursuit of rizal’s surname to mean a green field. this is trivia and of no real consequence in our appreciation of rizal, his works and deeds. reducing education to a trivial pursuit is an insult to the genius and writings of rizal and something i am sure educators really frown upon.

      is painting rizal’s house into green, something everyone hates and something we are really not sure about the only way to communicate the meaning of rizal’s surname?

      we agree with ocampo that it is a cute trivia but it does not deserve such a huge place, screaming to the point of inspiring vomit from onlookers. in the scheme of what rizal has done for our country, it is less than a tenth of oen dot in the ellipsis of rizal’s life and his achievements.

      we also do not buy what the rizalistas said that they accept the green color to mean rizal was an environmentalist. the color green taking the meaning of the environment is one that evolved during the modern times, not during the spanish period. the color green then most probably did not have any meaning yet.

      and did rizal’s family really think about it that way? did they paint their original house green to pay tribute to the trivial pursuit of the meaning of their surname?

      we do not think so. except that this idiot who painted rizal’s house green thought so. that is all that there is to it. enough of hiding below the skirt of historical facts and detective work. it does not hold water, nor paint. even if you scrape it. not even green paint.

  2. alexis r. cusi
    July 9, 2009 at 2:10 pm
    Reply

    dun sa nagpakana na pintahan ang bahay ng ating ginagalang na pambansang bayani. masaya ka ga sa ginawa mu!? aku ay hindi natutuwa sa ginawa mu!

  1. June 20, 2009 at 5:07 pm
    Rizal’s house « The Gulay Archipelago
  2. June 20, 2009 at 7:15 pm
    Monumental Fail: NHI Chair explains why Rizal’s house turned green « The Gulay Archipelago

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