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| Taro, called pising in Sagada. |
When I was a kid, every time we cooked taro for our food, I remember my father use to tell us a story about a place in Sagada which got its name from the plant. It’s somewhat like a Halloween story because it was a bloody one.
There is a place in Sagada called Atey. For the tourists and visitors and those who doesn’t know where it is found, you know you’re in Atey if you happened to be in food place called Lemon Pie Hauz.
You pass by it when you walk to visit the popular Sumaging Cave. But I am not sure if it is part of barangay Demang or Dagdag.
Anyway, the legend goes like this:
One afternoon, a man who came home from his farm to feed his birds or fowls found out that one of the roosters was missing. He waited for the rooster to come home but it was already dark and the rooster did not arrive.
The farmer suspected that somebody trapped it and had it as their food for the night. So, with a rage of anger in his heart, he buckled his bolo, a popular large knife in the Philippines used for cleaning the tall grasses and at the same time as weapon against assailants.
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| Bolo, Filipino use it for daily farm works and as weapon |
He went from one house to house in his neighborhood to spy.
Then, as he was listening to a conversation of one family who were about to eat their supper, he clearly heard one of the kids saying, “Kuak nan atey na, kuak nan atey na!” (The liver is mine, the liver is mine!)
Upon hearing the words, his blood went up to his brain. He took his bolo from its case, kicked the slightly opened wooden door and barge in and attacked the stunned family inside. He killed the father, the mother, and their children by hacking them.
When the next of kin of the family learned about the incident, the men gathered and resolved to avenge their family members who were killed.
They went to attack the home of the man who killed their relatives. Then like a raging fire the next of kin of the attacker heard what is happening, so their men also took their own bolos and went to avenge their relative who were attacked by the other family. Then everything got out of hand, all the men in the village were all now fighting.
The fight lasted the whole night. It only ended when the elders from the nearby villages came shouting at the top of their lungs to stop the men from killing each other.
After investigating what transpired, they found out that the liver the boy wanted to have was the tuber of the taro plant which his parents cooked for their food. The kid was just fancying and joking the tuber was a liver.
And in the early morning, they dug a large deep pit to bury all the bodies of those killed during the night.
From that time on, whenever somebody pass through or go to the place they describe it as atey for the others to easily understand what he/she means until the word became common as a descriptive name of the place.
What year it happened? I don’t know. But from my father’s(+) story, it seemed the incident happened probably two or three generations before him.
