The long drive from the international airport to the city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java at least has the virtue of easing a jet-lagged traveler through a liminal zone of rice paddy plains and jungle hills. Then the bustling metropolis shuts down, and all is business and hot tropical urban mayhem. The streets buzz with many scooters in what was once called “kota sepeda”, the bicycle city.
Only a small percentage of the millions who flock to hyper-touristy Bali make a side trip to Yogyakarta. It is a place of cultural and intellectual ferment, thick with universities, run by a respected royal family. It’s not easily broken down, which makes it, over several days, a great city to explore.
The first thing you notice, after the swarm of scooters, are the food stalls, warungs, which range from tiny stands to de facto outdoor restaurants. These line almost every street and alley, often obliterating sidewalks, with banners boasting that this candied candy (gudeg) has an impeccable recipe provenance, or that we eat “legendary” young goat satay here.
I spent more than two weeks exploring Yogya, but I started with the food, going from warung to warung and then restaurants, over several days. I was led to them by Tiko Sukarso, 39, a transplant to Jakarta who ran a Yogya restaurant until Covid ended it and now runs a sort of pop-up cooking club. I had fried noodles (bakmi goreng) at this warung, fried free range chicken (ayam goreng kampong) with sweet hot sambals at the next. For a 7 am breakfast I found Bu Sukardi’s warung, which makes soft tofu in a fiery ginger and palm sugar infusion (wedang tahu).
One night, to show the more formal side of Yogya food, Mr. Sukarso met me at the elaborate Javanese restaurant Griya Dhahar RB, in ornate open booths with carved teak chairs, where we had classic dishes like brongkos telur, a coconut. milk stew with peas, tofu, boiled eggs and a bitter lemony herb called melinjo.
“We love peanuts,” said Mr. Sukarso. “We love something fatty in a sauce, like peanut sauce on gado gado or lotek.” (These are salads that often include chewy tempeh.) “That’s on our root palate. Something dry, creamy, fatty, sweet, something fermented.”
Between meals, I went to museums, several art galleries, a huge annual contemporary art exhibition, a morning market, countless barista-style cafes for iced refreshments, a classical dance performance, and a cabaret in a dimly lit upstairs space dedicated to Muslim clothing at the city’s most famous batik trade, Hamzah Batik Shop. The classical dance involved exquisite gestures and halting body movements to a gamelan orchestra. The drag show was a joyous explosion of pure pop camp, where fans in hijabs posed for selfies with the drag stars.
One reason I returned to Yogyakarta for the first time since the 1980s was the designation in 2023 of a part of the city as a UNESCO World Heritage Site called the Cosmological Axis. The site was built in the 18th century by a sultanate that still rules the region politically and spiritually. It includes structures, details and symbols of a comparative mix of animist, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim beliefs that place Yogya at the center of the universe.
The area, wrapped around the city, looks austere, even unobtrusive. It includes a small monument, several gates, some fortifications, a low mosque, a magnificent complex of baths and gardens now disused, called the Taman Sari, or Water Castle, and two pairs of sacred banyan trees. At its heart is the Kraton, a tree-lined palace, airy and elegant, part of which is occupied by the 10th Sultan of Yogyakarta and his administration. One building houses an animated display about the cycles and rituals of Javanese life. In an open pavilion, there are daily dance and puppet shows, the most beautiful of which is a practice dance on Sunday morning, where the performers are instructed by the teachers – a privileged, intimate thing to witness.
One thing emerges if you slow down your tourist pace, paying attention to the Kraton and the nearby Sonobudoyo Museum: the culture of Yogya is complex, introverted, rhythmic, dealing with symbology, always in need of a good decoding. The most famous local dance performance is from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic, but how does this fit in a Muslim country where mosques ring out the pre-dawn prayer call on seemingly every block? One sees hijabs everywhere, but what would the authorities in Mecca do about these hijab-wearing fans?
Two religions, two temples
For a breathtaking sight, head to the ancient temple complexes outside the city called Prambanan and Borobudur, two magnificent structures honoring respective religions, built within 100 years by respective kingdoms, soon wrecked and abandoned, then revealed and restored, now considered precious, each a UNESCO site.
Prambanan is a vast collection of Hindu structures made of volcanic stone, dating back to the ninth century. Its larger temples, enclosed by bas-relief carvings, climb to enter rooms containing statues of Shiva, Ganesha, Durga and others. The site was mostly destroyed shortly after construction, possibly by the eruption of the nearby, still-active Mount Merapi. Of the 240 original temples, only a few central ones were reassembled in the 20th century, so that the site is filled with countless piles of ruins of smaller buildings. It is a place where the universe of human creativity faces the creative destruction, if not of the destroyer Shiva, then of the earth itself.
Thirty miles away, even closer to the volcano, is Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. It was also probably built in the ninth century, only to be abandoned after a few hundred years in the decline of Buddhism and the rise of Islam. Here, as Berkeley-educated Buddhist scholar Hudaya Kandahjaya put it to me, is a “Dharma pile,” meaning not so much for worship as for teaching. It is almost 400 feet square and 10 levels high. Visitors ascend from the lower regions, studying carved panels about earthly temptation, to the ornate top, representing enlightenment, where there are three levels ringed by 72 large hollow bell-shaped stupas into which you can look to see figures of the Buddha.
After the shaft and temples, I had a stroke. I met a famous artist, Siti Adiyati, 72, locally of royal descent. When I asked about the Cosmological Axis she invited me to her house. Ms. Adiyati is a social activist who in the 1970s rebelled against the Indonesian academy at Yogya’s famous art school.
On the outside pavilion of her large home compound, she had drawn a huge infographic on a dry-erase board. Here was the Kraton and its cosmic elements, including eight gates of symbolic significance. Note, he said, how the axis points north toward temperate Merapi. To the south lies the open sea, home to a goddess who looms large in local mythology. Ms. Adiyati had also designed mandalas, including the mandala-shaped Borobudur. There was a cartoon of the human body, involving gestures of Hindu and Buddhist origin that Ms. Adiyati learned as a student of Javanese dance when she was young.
“That one,” she said, waving her intricate work and laughing, “is me.” By which she also meant her city.
Villages within the city
“If you’re alone, you can work quickly,” artist Rangga Purbaya, 48, explained one afternoon as we sipped coffee near a giant banyan tree at the Jogja National Museum, a contemporary art space (which uses the old spelling for the city’s name). . “But if you’re on a team, you can go far.”
Mr. Purbaya, whose photo-based art often deals with the victims of the anti-communist mass killings of 1965, many of them from central Java, explained the city’s community spirit, represented in part by its many artist collectives—of of which one manages.
Many people have insisted that Yogya is a slower, more communal city than it appears when eschewing the scooters. Nona Yoanisarah, 32, an artist who has a side gig improving AI results for an American company, said: “Yogya is calmer, slower, softer. it is different. It’s a small town, but in a big way.”
To feel this, one must walk through the kampongs. These are the villages within the city, clusters of houses in labyrinthine arrangements of narrow streets. The kampongs must walk aimlessly. One sees well-fed cats roaming around, chickens swooping for bugs, songbirds in delicate cages, beautifully tinted walls and doors, and countless potted plants.
One of my favorite kampongs includes the area east of the Water Castle and the Pasar Ngasem market, an area infiltrated by a few tourist shops but still beautiful and diverse in its architecture as it abuts old royal walls and buildings. The other is the kampong near the Masjid Ghedhe Mataram mosque in the old town area of ​​Kotagede. This 18th-century mosque, the oldest in the city, is a must-see for the architectural styles of its gates and walls, which incorporate Hindu motifs that have long influenced Javanese design.
Then walk east and south through a row of houses. The kampong starts out opulent (try a fancy coffee at Longkang Kotagede Cafe or find the fancier Banyan-shaded Legian cafe) and then drifts south into an area of ​​trees, animals and communal spaces, where it evokes a timeless provincial village.
Having seen the temples, tasted the warungs, walked the kampongs and imagined the Cosmological Axis, you are now a certified Yogya visitor. As a world-traveling local who has lived in Sacramento and Chiang Mai, Thailand, among other places, told me, “Tourists who come to Yogyakarta come back.”
It is the universe of Yogya, we just visit it.
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