Honoring Java's royal heritage through Kraton Festival
Honoring Java's royal heritage through Kraton Festival
Text and photos by Mulkan Salmona
YOGYAKARTA (JP): For an entire week visitors to the ancient
royal city of Yogyakarta witnessed a series of spectacles that
many of Yogya's older citizens had seldom, if ever, seen before.
The occasion was this year's Kraton Festival, an annual event
which aims at popularizing Java's ancient court traditions. This
year's festival, held from Aug.13 to 20 in Yogyakarta, was a huge
success judging by the reaction of the locals as well as the
Indonesian and foreign tourists.
Seven heads of Java's once powerful royal houses attended the
festivities. Their courts displayed some of their most hallowed
ritual heirlooms and court paraphernalia while court dancers
performed some sacred dances which in earlier days commoners were
not permitted to see.
The hosts of this year's festival, the kraton of Yogyakarta
and the second ruling house of the Paku Alaman principality,
naturally dominated the displays, but the public did not ignore
the other sultanates. The Kraton of Surakarta, its related
Mangkunegaran principality, and the three royal courts of
Kasepuhan, Kanoman and Kacirebonan in Java's northern coastal
city of Cirebon also proudly displayed their heritage.
Even the Garebeg Maulud parade, an annual religious pageant
staged by the kraton to commemorate the birth of the Prophet
Muhammad, was held on a grander scale than usual. Huge mounds of
rice embellished with cooked vegetables were carried by the royal
guards from the palace to the nearby Grand Mosque for
distribution to the thousands of people crowding the mosque's
inner yards.
Of the seven royal houses of Java represented at the festival,
those in Surakarta and Yogyakarta have survived the tides of
history the longest. Born in the 18th century as a result of a
split in the court of Mataram, the two, together with the lesser
principalities of Mangkunegaran and Paku Alaman, retained some of
their authority under the Dutch East Indies colonial
administration until the outbreak of World War II.
The current heads of the three royal courts of Cirebon are all
descended from the founder of the Cirebon Sultanate, one of the
first Islamic kingdoms to flourish in the western part of Java.