environs who could carve religious images after being taught by the religious orders that arrived first in the Philippines. The abundance of talented sculptors was noted by the Dominican Bishop of Manila (the first in the country), Domingo de Salazar, when he wrote King Philip II of Spain in 1590. Most of these artisans were Sangleys (Chinese) living in the Parián, an enclave of Manila also administered by the Dominicans. On December 11, 1965, an article written by Oscar R. Landicho was published in the Chronicle magazine claiming that the Virgen Milagrosa was made by a "Greek" slave named Pere Morey in 1360. According to the article, Pere Morey was the father of Pere Oller and Pere Johan. To set the record straight, Pere Morey was not from Greece but was a subject of the Kingdom of Aragón (which would later become the Kingdom of Spain after its unification with the Kingdom of Castille in the 15th century). Morey was active in the island of Mallorca (then part of the Kingdom of Aragón) as a master mason (stonecutter) as well as an architect, and worked in the construction of various churches. Second, he was not related to Pere Oller and Pere Johan who were Gothic-style sculptors in the region of Catalunya. The writer may have been misled by the common name Pere (Pedro) which was not a surname or a family name but rather a first name. Pere Morey himself lived during the Gothic period of architecture and sculpture in Europe so to attribute to him a Baroque image like the Virgen Milagrosa of Orani would be something hard, if not impossible, to explain. Even in the remotest chance that the Virgen Milagrosa of Orani was made in 1360, it would be highly improbable that its devotees would have allowed the Dominican missionaries to take away to a distant land an image that would already have been more than 200 years old at that time (in the 1580s). Pere Morey is not to be confused with Pere Morey Servera, an award-winning Catalan writer born in 1941 and who is still active to this day. Miracles In 1596, the Dominican friars established the "visita" of Samal, under the parish of Abucay and transferred the image thereto. According to oral tradition, shortly after Samal was established as a Parish on April 20, 1644, the statue disappeared from its altar and was later