Welcome to Surabaya
Surabaya is cosmopolitan, but without the jarring pseudo-Western glitter of Jakarta. Give or take an air-conditioned shopping complex or two, Surabaya's atmosphere is more purely Indonesian, with a special cast Indonesian flavor. For as Surabaya grew as an export point for Javanese products, it also became the hub of the maritime trading network for the eastern archipelago as a whole. Much of its population is from nearby Madura, but there are also large numbers of Banjar from Kalimantan, Bugis and Minahasans from Sulawesi and Ambonese from the Moluccas.
Surabaya's colonial boom was in a sense, a renaissance, for the port has a long history. In 1620, it was a fortified trading city over 30 kilometers in circumference, a state in its own right with lordship over Gresik and Sidayu. However, five years later Mataram took it by siege, thus ending Surabaya's luster for more than two centuries. According to tradition, the conquered king's son took on the life of an ascetic at the holy grave of Surabaya's founder - yet another wali, Sunan Ngampel, who was a pupil of Malik Ibrahim of Gresik. His grave can be seen in Kampong Ngampel, the birth place of the city, now lost in the old commercial district between the forks of the Kali Mas

A little to the south, where J1. Rajawali crosses the west branch of the river, is the famous Red Bridge, once the heart of Dutch Surabaya. In 1920, rush hour was, 11 an indescribable press of four- and twowheeled carriages, carts loaded with merchandise, travelling sailors, native and Chinese merchants, coolies..." Today's roaring motorized battle leaves one at an even greater loss for words, but the neighborhood is now evocatively dowdy, with run-down Dutch warehouses and prewar offices.

When the Red Bridge neighborhood was in its prime, it was the geographic center of the city, halfway between the docks in the north and the gracious suburban administrative precinct served by Gubeng Station in the south. The dock complex at Tanjung Perak remains much as it was, except for its new airconditioned passenger terminal. Coolies still unload sacks of copra, pepper and cloves from boats from such places as Tarakan, Tolitoli and Temate. Scrubbing, hammering sailors struggle to keep ageing warships seaworthy; as in Dutch times, this is Indonesia's main naval base. But in the south, urban growth has swamped the old civic boulevard, JI. Pernuda / J1. Gub Suryo, now a commercial thoroughfare lined with banks and hotels. Nevertheless, Grahadi, the residence of the Dutch governor, still stands here on immaculate lawns, an island of tranquillity preserved by the presence of today's Governor of East Java. On a plinth opposite the residence stands the corpulent figure of Joko Dolog, a 13th-century statue from the Malang area which has long been Surabaya's trademark.
Around the comer on JI. Tunjungan is a building which recalls both the heyday and the end of colonialism in Indonesia. Hotel Majapahit Mandarin Oriental, which opened in 1910 as Hotel Oranje, was Surabaya's finest. Countless settlers, ship owners and cruise ship passengers were served rijsttafel in its palatial dining room and sipped Bols on its polished terraces. The unsightly air-conditioning units bolted to the more expensive rooms are a concession to modernity, but otherwise, this pavilion-style hotel retains its old-world grace. In 1942 the invading Japanese renamed it Hotel Yamato and after their defeat an attempt to make it Oranje again precipitated an incident which helped spark off the biggest.

The blurred, monochrome photographs of this event have not lost their power to move; they show Indonesian youths scaling the building's squat tower to tear off the blue strip from the Dutch tricolor on the flagpole, leaving the merah putih, the red and white flag of the republic.
At this time, there were only a few Dutchmen in the city; order was officially in the hands of 6000 British troops, who were mostly Indian. When these seemed about to be massacred by more than 100,000 Indonesian fighters bent on various combinations of revolution and jihad, the British flew in Sukarno and Hatta to arrange a ceasefire. However, there was more fighting, and on November 10, 1945, a day now commemorated as Hari Pahlawan (Heros' Day), the British began a bloody, punitive sweep through Surabaya, supported by naval and air bombardments. Many of the defenders fought in the ancient state of selfless frenzy which has entered the English language as "amok;" the fighting lasted three weeks. Though the Republicans lost thousands of men, the Battle of Surabaya was a turning point in the revolution, convincing the outside world that the republican leaders were not simply a group of isolated collaborators who would soon be denounced by their own people. Those who fought and died on the Indonesian side are commemorated by the Tugu Pahlawan (Heroes' Monument), and the whole city is often honored with the epithet Kota Pahlawan (City of Heroes). An army museum containing relics of the revolution, the Museum Angkatan 45, is located in the far south of town.
East Java is the original home of much of the island's classical cultural heritage. The first great works of old Javanese literature were composed here, including the Arjunawiwaha, the Bharatayuddha and the Ramayana, all classic Old Javanese versions of ancient Sanskritmyths. Episodes from East Java's history supply the raw material for the Panji and Damar Wulan romances, which provide lighter alternatives to the Indian epics of wayang repertoire. Panji is a perfect knight whose pursuit of his true love, the equally flawless Dewi Anggreni, gives him ample scope to demonstrate his courage and honor. Damar Wulan, a more demotic hero, is a stable boy who manages to marry a princess of Majapahit.
The East Javanese have their own genres as well as their own scripts. The Panji cycle is often played by the wayang gedog - essentially a form of wayang kulit, but with a slightly different style of puppet and accompaniment from a seven-tone pelog gamelan rather than the customary five-tone slendro type. Sunan Giri himself is said to have introduced this wayang form. Ludruk is a special Surabayan form of drama in which the settings are contemporary urban households and the human actors speak the local arek dialect.

The whole range of the region's performing arts can be sampled in Surabaya, although for dance, the most prestigious venue is the Candra Wilwatikta Open Air Theatre near Pandaan, 45 kilometers south of the city. Traditional arts form a living part of folk culture in Surabaya in a way that is being lost in Jakarta. The decrepit red light districts of Jarak and Bangunrejo, for instance, are still the haunt of ronggeng, dancinggirls-cum-prostitutes who dance by the roadside just as they centuries years ago.

Surabaya is also a good place to watch reog, one of Java's oldest and strangest entertainments. Reog is the local name for the ancient trance dance which occurs in different forms and under different names from Banten to Bali. In West and Central Java, the main performer rides a flat hobby horse of woven bamboo and is literally whipped into his trance state while weird clowns look on, a surreal scene which sets the imagination roving. In East Java and Bali, grotesque monster masks are worn. The Reog Ponorogo (after Ponorogo, a small town south of Madiun) performed in Surabaya combines both types in a spectacle of orchestrated madness.

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