Demon statue to go after Tugatog Cemetery facelift

MANILA, Philippines — Through the years, an icon amused, spooked and even frightened some visitors of the Tugatog Public Cemetery in Malabon City: the statue of Lucifer, all dark including his wings, stamping on St. Michael the Archangel, built on top of two tombstones.

The image was said to be a symbol of evil’s triumph over good, as envisioned by Simeon Bernardo, who came from a well-off family in the city’s Barangay Concepcion and lived during the Spanish colonial period.

However, the statue will have to be removed to give way to a planned facelift of the cemetery.

Bernardo’s great grandson, Martin Pison, confirmed to The STAR that the icon was taken away this week and that his cousin worked on it.

Pison emphasized that the remains of Bernardo and those of his three daughters had been transferred to another cemetery in the 1990s, years before the planned rehabilitation of the memorial park in Tugatog.

The cemetery would remain closed to the public from Nov. 4 to 10 for city government personnel to conduct clearing operations, Voltaire dela Cruz, administrator of the city government, told The STAR yesterday.

It would reopen afterwards, but only to accommodate relatives of departed relatives buried there who asked to transfer the remains to other cemeteries.

Cruz said Lucifer’s statue, along with an altar said to be almost a century old, would be “donated” to the city government, which would ask the contractor to include the icon in the new design of the cemetery.