From dayang to Maria: The Catholic story of Pasig

By Jared Echevarria

Like all great cities, our story begins with a river. If you come to think of it, everything starts with water.
This sacred liquid is a basic element of life. Its mere presence signals the fertility of a promised land
brimming with hope. If not for the river, how else can humanity thrive and build upon her banks the
beginnings of empires? The Pasig is our Tiber or the twins Tigris and Euphrates. It is a river that begins
where the sun rises and ends where the sun sets. For some, the Pasig is their world, to others, it is their
life. Hence, this river embraced men as it cultivated in her streams villages upon villages that honored
her by naming their lands based on her movements and dispositions. Enchantress certainly is the Pasig
for it lured everyone to her including the colonizers. The success of their conquest paved the way for
Manila to become the Insigne y Siempre Leal Ciudad.

The river became the first Spanish highway connecting settlements when building roads were difficult
because of the thick vegetations. But apart from the sake of the Crown is for the cause of the Cross. And
saints be praised for the Pasig have carried in her bed for a thousand years what the Augustinians
carried in their phials, agua bendita. Holy is the water of this river that the missionaries chose to land in
an area embraced by this tributary and the Laguna de Bay. They found the land worthy and so, through
their zeal, made it as the center of their evangelization. The meeting place of two great waters, this area
was truly blessed. But before the Europeans, this place was already a seat of power.

Filipino names of the past are usually a homage to a great ideal. It is a way for them to call the spirits in
hopes to govern their children and be living examples of such greatness. Since then up to the present we
have names such as Makisig, Malaya and surnames such as Dimalanta or Lacandola – a remembrance of
a sort to a kingdom once upon a time. To be named after the heavens is a reminder of a divinely mission
that is far greater from the rest. Dayang Kalangitan was born in a kingdom converged by two waters in
what is now Pasig town. She may be a stuff of legends like her equally regal cousin Princess Urduja of
Pangasinan. However, her tale was passed down to remind us that we are a learned and advanced
society even before the Caucasians came in the picture. As a local nobility, she was engaged to the King
of Tondo, Lontok and together settled in the banks of Bitukang Manok, a tributary connecting the Pasig.
A dayang is the modern-day equivalent of a Princess or a Queen Consort therefore making Kalangitan,
the Queen of Pasig, the last Pasiguena to hold the honorific title.