Midnight romps keep spring bubbling

That night, dozens of people walked to a small spring, known as Sendang Sonder, in Tulakan village, Keling district, Jepara. It was night time on Wage (Friday), according to the Javanese calendar.

Sendang Sonder has become famous as a sacred place in the regency where people perform a series of rituals in the hope of achieving their wishes -- finding a husband or wife, more money, job promotion and many other earthly or materialistic things.

Physically, the spring is just a small pool in a river measuring about a meter in depth and four meters by three meters in area. The spring has sparkling, clean water that keeps flowing, even when the river has dried up during the dry season.

However, Tulakan villagers consider this spring to be the holiest and sacred of places, a belief originated from a legend of a famous princess of Demak Islamic kingdom in Central Java, which went through political upheavals following the death of Demak King Sultan Trenggana sometime during the early 16th century.

According to the story, when the princess, Ratu (Queen) Kalinyamat, found that her beloved husband Prince Parwata was killed by his political opponent Adipati Arya Penangsang, she ran away to the Sendang Sonter spring. The angry Ratu Kalinyamat later swore she would meditate naked near the spring water in spiritual revenge until she knew that Arya Penangsang was killed. She also vowed to wash her long black hair with his blood.

The story led to the strong belief that some residual spiritual power of the princess still exists at the place.

Since then, people from both the village and its surroundings have used the spring for meditating and for rituals to achieve their specific goals or dreams.

As time went by, visitors misinterpreted the site's significance. There have been a number of weird rituals that visitors are required to perform before they are believed to be able to fulfill their wishes.

First, visitors have to bathe in the spring water and stay there for about one or two hours. After bathing, they have to choose a mate among the unknown visitors with whom to have sexual intercourse. They must do so even though they do not know each other and have only just met for a few minutes at the site.

"Not only Jepara people visit the site: Many come from outside Jepara," said Slamet Sukirman, 32, of Gemolong village in the Central Java town of Sragen, who claimed to have visited the site three times.

Tulakan villagers said they could not quite remember when people started to perform sex rituals at Sendang Sonder.

"People have been visiting the site since I was a little boy. But people from outside Jepara began to visit it in the 1980s. Most were adults then, but recently many teenagers have also started to visit the site," said Badawi, 40, from Kelet village.

This sex ritual has encouraged people to practice "sexual" activities. They mostly come to the site, not to seek spiritual enlightenment, but only for hedonistic purposes. Sendang Sonder has turned from a sacred site to red-light venue.

Surprisingly, local people do not seem too bothered by it.

"Why should they bother? They have benefited economically from the visitors and their activities. They hire out mats, open food stalls or provide parking services," Badawi said.

Yogyakarta-based cultural observer Suryanto Sastroatmodjo discovered a similarity between Sendang Sonder and other sites in Central Java, like the graveyard of Pangeran (Prince) Samudro in Gunung Kemukus, Boyolali. People go to the graveyard to perform sex rituals in the hope they can achieve their dreams.

Suryanto believed people might misinterpret the myths. People, he said, had to understand the real purpose of Ratu Kalinyamat's nude meditation was not for sexual or physical purposes but was a spiritual act in order to take revenge on her enemy.

"If it is true that the place has now turned into a free-sex zone, it is a form of historical harassment," Suryanto said.

Psychologist Koentjoro of Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, however, saw the phenomenon of Sendang Sonder in Jepara from a different perspective. He said the successful prostitution businesses in the region were supported by the phenomenon of the Sendang Sonder myth.

"The free sex that was previously engaged in for spiritual reasons -- if they ever really existed -- now has become more economically motivated. It's not surprising, therefore, that the region has attracted the attention of pimps, who look for girls to send to the big cities as sex workers," Koentjoro said.

Nurkholis, a resident of Keling, shared Koentjoro's opinion, saying that the increase in the interest of local girls to work in big cities as commercial sex workers was due to the increased number of outside visitors coming to Sonder.

"Sonder has turned into a place where local girls gather and wait for a car pickup from particular pimps who will take them to big cities and employ them as sex workers," said Nurkholis, who is also a teacher at a local private junior high school.

-- Singgir Kartana