SRI
SULTAN PALACE
 One
of the first deeds of Hamengku Buwono I was to order the construction
of the Kraton Yogyakarta, the palace which is Yogya's core.
This kraton is a city within a city. Thousands of people live
and work within its walls - batik makers, servants and guards,
as well as the musicians, jesters and polowijo or "weeds"
(albinos and dwarfs) of the sultan's retinue, and the royal
family itself. The central buildings, the first of which were
completed in 1757, comprise a maze of pendopo - open or semi-open
pavilions - which are separated by courtyards planted with shady
trees. The outer walls, each more than one kilometer long and
three meters thick, caused the Dutch much consternation when
they were added in 1785; but they did not prevent a thousand
or so British Indian sepoys from taking the kraton against 11,000
defenders in 1812, with the sole casualty being a Scottish officer
who was stabbed by a princess he was carrying away as booty
Not surprisingly, that debacle was the end of the court's independent
military, which then accepted the superior power of the returning
Dutch and devoted itself to self-beautification and the development
of the Javanese arts. Although it seems timeless, today's kraton
is essentially the kraton of this "theatrical" period,
featuring opulent Indo-Dutch furniture, oil paintings by the
19th-century Javanese artist Raden Saleh, and several huge gamelan
orchestras. Perhaps it is this very element of artifice which
gives the palace its other-wordly atmosphere. The ninth sultan,
who reigned 1939-88, brought the court down to earth just in
time to secure its future, supporting the republic in 1945-49
and even giving over part of the palace to house the first independent
Indonesian university, Gajah Mada, now located in the north
of the city. Today, the kraton houses a museum and stages regular
gamelan and dance performance.
Taman
Sari ("Fragrant Garden"), also known a.,; the Water
Castle. is even more fanciful. Located to the southwest of the
main buildings, this labyrinthine ruin was the opulent pleasure
palace of the first sultan. Ngasem, the adjacent bird market,
is built on the dry bed of an artificial lake, across which
Dutch visitors were once rowed, in gilded boats, to a manmade
island. Only the smaller, central bathing pools have been restored;
the rest is in an evocative state of tropical decay.
Immediately in front of the kraton is the Alun-alun Lor, the
town's main square. It is here that fights between tigers and
buffalo were once staged for the entertainment and instruction
of European dignitaries; the tiger represented Europe, the buffalo
Java, and the steadfast strength of the buffalo seldom failed
to overcome the ferocity of the tiger. On the west side of the
square is the very Javanese Mesjid Agung (Grand Mosque), which
was built in the form of a pendopo. Three times a year, during
the garebeg festivals, the sultan takes part in a spectacular
procession from the palace to the mosque, accompanied by flower
bedecked heaps (gunungan) of rice, evidence of his charity.
The greatest of these events is Garebeg Maulud, when the square
seethes with performers and pedlars, and musicians play on two
ancient gamelan from the palace, for the entire week leading
up to the procession.
Not far north of the alun-alun is the original Dutch fort, Benteng
Vredenburg. In 1765, the first sultan agreed to build a fortress
for VOC troops in his city. However, despite his industriousness
in the field of pleasure gardens, and the fact that the four-kilometer
walls around his own palace were supposedly built in two weeksflat,
the sultan did not manage to complete Vredenburg within his
lifetime; Governor-General Daendels finally put a firm end to
the procrastination in 1808. Opposite the fort is Gedung Negara,
the handsome 19th-century home of the Dutch Resident. Further
east, on JI. Sultan Agung is the Paku Alaman, the palace of
Yogya's junior royal house, created by Raffles in 1813, as a
counterweight to the court of Hamengko Buwono, which he had
just had occasion to storm. The Paku Alaman, which is not open
to the public, is a less lavish version of the main kraton.
The British
attack on Yogyakarta in 1812, ended the military power of the
Javanese courts proper, but it was not quite the last stand
of the aristocracy as a whole. In 1825, after years of court
corruption and intrigue, increasing erosion of aristocratic
privileges by the European government, and several ominous natural
disasters, a Muslim visionary and scion of the royal family,
Prince Diponegoro, raised a rebellion against both the kraton
and the Dutch which lasted five years and cost more than 200,000
lives.
Retrospectively
styled as a freedom fighter, Diponegoro is one of the bestknown
figures in Indonesian history. He was raised in Tegalrejo, five
kilometers northwest of the kraton, where his residence has
been reconstructed as the
Diponegoro Monument; with displays of the hero's relics and
realistic paintings of the war. In 1830, Diponegoro was finally
captured, 40 kilometers northwest of Yogya at Magelang, home
to yet another commemorative museum, Museum Diponegoro. More
than a century of oppressive peace followed, the rust en orde
(peace and order) of Dutch colonialism, described by one nationalist
of the 1930s as "the peace of death." When that peace
was broken at last, by Japan and the Indonesian revolution,
Yogya was once again at the center of the whirlwind as capital
of the infant republic from January 1946 until its seizure by
Dutch troops in December 1948. The Museum Sasmitaloka Jenderal
Soedirman celebrates the most important Indonesian military
hero of this time, an Islamic schoolteacher who, wasted by tuberculosis,
led the republic's armed forces from a litter, which can be
seen here.
Yogya's main street is J1. Malioboro, famous for its stalls
that offer souvenirs by day and food by night. Gudeg, a mild
jackfruit
curry, is Yogya's speciality. Central Javanese food is the sweetest
and least spicy in Indonesia, and makes much use of the soybean
products tahu and tempe.
Insulated by Dutch policy from the changes sweeping other parts
of Java during the late colonial period, Yogya was free to both
maintain cultural traditions which had faded elsewhere and to
innovate energetically indigenous Javanese themes. The Dutch
helped with the preservation, as the Sonobudoyo Museum, a cultural
museum that was opened in 1935, testifies; the innovation was
all Yogya's own. Both tradition and innovation have contributed
to the town's present aesthetic wealth. In the field of batik,
the main trend was towards the conservative. Around Taman Sari
and in the J1. Tirtodipuran neighborhood, workshops produce
a variety of traditional and royal patterns.
WAYANG
KULIT
 Wayang
kulit, the ancient shadowplay, is a whole way of life in Yogya.
There are numerous craftsmen who produce the intricate leather
puppets, and two schools for dalang (puppeteers). Several institutions
offer regular public performances of this magical spectacle,
sometimes even the traditional all-night version. As a repertoire,
the Indian epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata are generally preferred
over more recent Javanese and Middle Eastern stories. Yogya's
dance, by contrast, tends to he highly untraditional. Although
some sacred and court dances are preserved, the masked dance-dramas
known from the 11 th century and still popular in West and East
Java are seldom performed in Yogya. They have been replaced
by the unmasked wayang wong, an 18th century innovation, and
the sendratari, a Western-influenced dance spectacle without
dialogue. The best-known example of this is the "Ramayana
BalleC performed at Prambanan's Loro Jonggrang Theater.
Since
the revolutionary, arts-oriented Taman Siswa school system was
introduced in 1922, Yogya has developed into a center for the
visual arts. Pioneers like Affandi, whose Affandi Museum is
open to the public, used European oils and perspective, defying
the Islamic taboos against human representation and ushering
in the first wave of a new, confident and individualistic art.
SOLO
AND SURROUNDINGS
 The
twin courts of Yogyakarta were only two of four princely states
to survive the incremental Dutch conquest of Java. The others
were in Surakarta, rnore commonly known as Solo, at the eastern
foot of Mt. Merapi. Not as quick to move with the times as those
of Yogya, the Solo courts were unable to reconcile themselves
with the republic, and in June 1946 their prerogatives outside
the palace walls were abolished forever. Today their old territories
are simply part of the province of Central Java.
Some eight
kilometers before Solo, on the road from Yogya, is the village
of Kartasura, where a single crumbling brick wall is the only
reminder that the capital of Mataram was here for 66 years.
The Javanese courts were extraordinarily flexible: war, misfortune
or the whim of a new king could lead to a capital's being transported
(sometimes literally, for important pendopo could be dismantled
and carried) to a new, safer or more auspicious site, leaving
behind a mostly wooden ruin which was quickly reclaimed by tropical
nature.
Kartasura
was founded in 1680 when the previous capital at Plered (near
Kota Gede, Yogyakarta) was occupied by an imposter; in 1746,
after three years of disastrous war against the Dutch and their
allies, Pakubuwana II decided to abandon the obviously unlucky
site, and in 1746 he moved to the Kraton Hadin. ingrat in Solo,
the fifth and final capital of Mataram. Though badly damaged
by a fire in 1985, the kraton is still worth seeing. It contains
a museum of regal pomp, a cannon from Portuguese Malacca (the
"wife" of the one in Jakarta's Taman Fatilah), and
a peculiar pagoda in which the "emperors" (as the
Dutch called them) trysted with the Queen of the South Seas.
There is also an important library of Javanese manuscripts.
The last of the great Javanese court poets, Raden Ngabei Ronggawarsita,
worked here until his death in 1873.
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