Jose Rizal’s 100-year-old secret in Germany By Michaela P. del Callar 09/26/2010

Jose Rizal’s 100-year-old secret in Germany By Michaela P. del Callar 09/26/2010

BERLIN — Stored in a German museum’s metal cabinets and glass vaults with controlled temperature for more than a century, Jose Rizal’s intricately hand-woven Barong Tagalog and other cultural mementoes depict how he once proudly showed off his small Southeast Asian nation’s cultural heritage in mighty Europe.

Then a dreamy-eyed Filipino in his 20s, Rizal had traveled to Germany in 1886 to further his studies in Medicine, nurture his revolutionary zeal, and finish writing and publish his epic novel, the Noli Me Tangere.
Rizal brought along keepsakes that reminded him of home — a wood and brass betel nutcracker, a rice stalk cutter, a beaded belt from Mindanao, a tawo-piece Muslim ethnic garment, and a 19th century baro’t saya woven from piña and abaca fiber. The cultural pieces in his bachelor’s pad in a quaint residential building in Berlin’s upscale Stadtmitte district were donated to the German city’s Ethnological Museum when he decided to return to the Philippines.

Back home, he kept his romance with Europe and continued shipping and donating cultural artifacts to the Berlin museum a year.... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20100926hed3.html