The Sunken Garden, or officially the General Antonio Luna Parade Grounds, lies at the heart of the scenic University of the Philippines-Diliman campus. A natural depression sprawled across five hectares, the garden is a grassy field shaped like cupped hands on the eastern side of the country’s leading tertiary educational institution. Embraced by the Academic Oval’s ring of acacia trees, it is also flanked, clockwise from its eastern part, by the Vinzons Hall, Benitez Hall/College of Education, Gonzales Hall/University Library, and Malcolm Hall/College of Law, respectively.
What makes the UP Diliman campus a delight to see is the unevenness of its lush landscape, and the Sunken Garden profoundly accents this interesting characteristic. Many wonder how its natural form came to be. Contrary to popular belief, there is no active fault line running beneath the garden or the larger Academic Oval that it is a part of. The most plausible theory is that it is due to the campus waterway system: there was a creek that ran through it that was eventually diverted and split into two, with the twin currents flowing on opposite sides, covered with soil via engineering.
Members of the UP Diliman community and visitors alike have been indulging in various fun activities in the Sunken Garden or along the eastern tip of the Academic Oval that surrounds it: Weekend mornings and late afternoons are ideal for physical exercises like jogging, recreational football, frisbee, and other sports. People also visit it to stroll with pets, relish picnics, or just hang out alone or with friends while enjoying nature and humanity.
The traditional UP Fair with its concerts and carnival rides, and the Lantern Parade with its bright and artistic lanterns and floats, are popular annual events to look forward to.
But while the Sunken Garden offers a cornucopia of exciting events and activities, it is also a witch’s cauldron that serves tragic memories:
It was a scene of the crime that awoke the then-19-year-old me to the stark realization that even the best and brightest among our youth can be slain by senseless violence. If there were student activists martyred by the violence perpetrated during the dark years of martial law under the Marcos Sr. dictatorship in the 1970s, in 1994, student leader Dennis Venturina’s life was claimed by fraternity violence. He was about to graduate with honors when members of a rival fraternity pounced on him and his fraternity brothers while they were lining up for lunch just outside the Beach House Canteen on the western border of the Sunken Garden. That incident also reinforced in my mind the randomness of death.
It’s also a repository of one of my dearest memories in the late 1990s, of the penultimate time I interacted with my friend, the late poet and revolutionary Ericson Acosta. It was another night at the UP Fair, and the student organization I belonged to managed a booth at the Sunken Garden selling T-shirts, one of them with the face of Mao Zedong printed on it. Ericson bought the shirt, but only paid half the price as he didn’t have enough in his pocket. He pledged to pay the balance another day. I never bothered reminding him about the trifling sum.
Years later, in 2022, Ericson was killed along with a companion in Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental by soldiers of the Philippine Army. He met the same fate as his wife, Kerima Tariman, another brilliant writer who was likewise gunned down by military forces, but in the previous year in a different part of the province. Ericson didn’t pay what he owed for the shirt, but he paid with his very life in serving the people according to the ideology of The Great Helmsman. (The last time I met him—and just by chance—was in 2013: smoking at a street corner one afternoon in front of a sari-sari store a couple of blocks from my house, newly-released from jail after the complaint of illegal possession of explosives filed against him was dropped.)
Ericson Acosta, Kerima Teriman, Dennis Venturina, and almost all, if not all, students of UP Diliman through the decades – heroes or heels, dead and/or martyred or alive – had dipped their feet into the melting pot of the enchanting Sunken Garden in their youth.
