When the artist Nemesio R. Miranda, Jr. (popularly called Nemiranda by his peers) saw the shape of Leyte island, he saw the image of Jesus hanging on the cross. And to prove his assertion, he created the 45-foot tall Crucified Christ and the Map of Leyte Pilgrim Monument, located in Tacloban City on top of the Kanhuraw Hill near the City Hall. This sculpture, made of concrete, fiberglass, and steel, depicts an image of Jesus Christ on the front and a sculpted map of Leyte at the back. The shape of Leyte and the sculpted Christ match.

Photo by akuma508.

I’m somewhat a religious person and a somewhat devout Catholic, but it does take quite a stretch of the imagination to see a crucified Jesus in the map of Leyte. Well, admittedly, the narrowing middle of Leyte does seem to be like a person’s waist while the two peninsulas of Southern Leyte seem to be amputated legs. Hehehe. Anyway, you might be interested to learn that the phenomenon of seeing “things” in unrelated objects (such as animals in the clouds or the man on the moon) is called pareidolia. Religious images are probably the most commonly talked-about and mass-media-reported cases of pareidolia. There’s even a Wikipedia article dedicated to it.

Going back to the Leyte sculpture, there’s a picture of the plaque at the bottom of the sculpture in Flickr. The plaque contains messages from the governor of Leyte and Nemiranda, the sculptor, himself.

Download KML file (for Google Earth)