Restoring fallen heritage churches

I was at the University of San Carlos Downtown Campus (formerly its main campus) supervising the preparations for an upcoming exhibition jointly curated with the National Archives of the Philippines when the earthquake occurred. This is not my first time to experience such a tremor. There was that one last year on my birthday and the massively devastating one that killed 17,000 in Pagadian after a tsunami followed its wake during the early hours of August 17, 1976.

But every tremor elicits a feeling of panic and no matter how one goes through it many times over, the experience is always harrowing one.

The most tragic result of the quake is the fate that now awaits the most severely damaged of about 18 churches in Bohol as well as the belfry of the Basilica del Sto. Niño. The strong faith of Cebuanos in the miraculous Sto. Niño will most probably speed up fund raising to restore this bell tower. The cost itself would be relatively minimal compared to the massive expenditure that will be required to bring back the old glory of the Loboc and Baclayon churches – and those are just two of five or six churches in total that will need a massive infusion of both conservation experts and money to rebuild them.

The church in Loon, now nothing more than a rubble pile is, without doubt, the most difficult to bring back to its original look. It will in fact be many times cheaper to build a new church over the ruins of the old one. But Bohol, like Cebu, is known for its peoples’ strong belief in miracles and in surviving the odds. It would thus not surprise me if all the Bol-anons all over the world will pour in their financial resources to bring about millions of dollars that will be required just to get this one church to stand proudly once more.

The only caveat– and itself a massive hurdle – is how to go beyond environmental laws, get an exemption perhaps, and extract huge coral stones from the sea, cut them to sizes akin to those that were there in the church before they all exploded due to the pressure from the earthquake. Alternatively, and this is where modern Cebuano techniques in stonecraft will probably help, one can develop ‘stones’ with a near likeness to the old coral stones using science and craftsmanship

I can also think of one model that can be looked into in restoring these churches. On Sept. 26, 1997 two earthquakes struck the central region of Italy in rapid succession, registering 5.5 and 6.1 on the Richter Scale. One of the aftershocks that followed the quake resulted in the destruction of the ceiling vault of the Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, killing some conservation experts who were there on an inspection tour of the ceiling frescoes. The basilica, constructed between 1228 and 1253 is the mother church of the Franciscans, or more formally, the Order of the Friars Minor (OFM). It is here where the remains of St. Francis are interred, making it an important part of the pilgrimage trail.

Unlike the papal basilica, however, the ceiling of these damaged churches in Bohol is made of wood and not of travertine or some other kind of cut stone and mortar. That will make it easier to bring back, speaking in relative terms of course. The more difficult one will be the walls and façade of these churches. Classic Roman construction techniques were used by the Spaniards, adapted to tropical conditions, in the construction of these churches. Designed to withstand cannon fire from Moro raiders and other marauders, these church walls were all one-meter thick or even more. Their foundations went down to something like six meters made mostly of huge trunks of hardwood trees cut to size and piled down through the sandy-clayish soil. Upon this foundation were poured the ‘argamasa’, a mixture of coral rubble (graba made of coral stones and limestone together with fine sand and as binder, ‘apog’ or lime together with the sticky sap of the lauat tree as well as egg whites. The argamasa was poured in between a kind of formwork using ‘amakan’, woven bamboo strips. Once dried, coral stones cut to size were then attached over these rough walls which were the finished with a thin layer of lime mortar and fine sand. Over time, however, this finishing would erode because of rain and the elements and out would come the cut coral stones that we still see in colonial churches today.

That is more or less the process that will be attempted by whoever will reconstruct these churches. But, like the papal basilica, modern methods and techniques of shoring up these structures in order to prevent them from standing rigid and thus explode during an earthquake will have to be injected into the process. I believe this is where the methodology applied in the papal basilica as well as 23 other heritage structures that were restored over time in Assisi will come in handy.

The cost, as I keep repeating here, will be tremendous. But we all dodged the bullet in last Tuesday’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake the likes of which was never experienced before by Cebuanos and Boholanos alike.

And one way to be thankful that we all survived is to start supporting the restoration not just of these churches but of the lives of our fellows who were not as lucky as we were.