Guiuan Opens the Quincentennial with an Exhibit

Posted on 28 March 2021
By NQC Secretariat

The
Municipality of Guiuan, Eastern Samar opened the 2021 Quincentennial Commemorations in the Philippines (2021 QCP) with a humble commemorative exhibit on 15 March 2021. Titled “Guiuan: Humble Haven of Hope, Hospitality, and Humanity,” the exhibit narrates the 500 years of Guiuan’s dynamic role as a place of compassion, magnanimity, and kindness. The town mattered in the history of the first circumnavigation of the world 500 years ago when its people extended assistance to the starving, undernourished, and scurvy-stricken crew of the Magellan-Elcano expedition. It was also the first place in the Philippines to witness the liberation of the country from the Japanese occupation in 1944. Five years later, it became home to thousands of homeless anti-communist Russians when no country in the world opened its door.

The exhibit also memorializes the world-wide assistance to Guiuan after the super typhoon Yolanda in 2013 (the town, being the first landfall of the typhoon). The exhibit is housed in the container vans which were used as temporary municipal offices after the Yolanda onslaught until the construction of the new municipal building in 2018. Other container vans salvaged from anonymity will be reused and converted into the future Guiuan Museum, set to be opened in 2022.