New lease on life sought for graveyard

New lease on life sought for graveyard

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

It's certainly a graveyard but is it a museum or a monument?
Could it, perhaps, be a memorial park?

Whatever name you give it, experts have agreed that Museum
Taman Prasasti (Museum of Inscriptions), one of Jakarta's
heritage sites, needs an urgent facelift to preserve its cultural
value.

Historians, architects and archeologists, who met in a
Thursday seminar on the planned development of the old graveyard,
made several recommendations to the city's museum agency,
including creating a new name for the site that would suit it
better.

"We feel that the name Museum Kerkhof Kebon Jahe (Kebon Jahe
Memorial Museum) would fit better as it is a memorial site that
has been made into a museum," panel chairwoman Karina Arifin told
the seminar.

The new name included the museum's location, Kebon Jahe in
Central Jakarta, while the word kerkhof was Dutch for graveyard,
Karina said.

The panel also suggested a competition in which architects and
designers could vie to create the best restoration design. The
winning design would have to protect the gravestones in the area
and develop the museum as an educational and recreational
conservation site, she said.

The museum, located beside the Central Jakarta municipality
office in Jl. Abdul Muis, has seen better days. It has gone
through several restorations since the first in 1977, when the
5.5-hectare Dutch graveyard was turned into a museum.

At that time, the city administration chose 32 gravestones it
considered the most important, and placed them onto freestanding
columns that many people consider ugly.

The graveyard later shrunk to only 1.3 hectares, after the
city built its office on the site, incorporating many of the
gravestones into the walls of the complex.

"Many of the restoration phases in the past were done
carelessly," architect Danang Priatmodjo said. "(The site) needs
careful handling in the future."

Conservation architects Arya Abieta and Budi Lim suggested
that an initial study on the structure, materials and historical
value of the site should be made before a design was developed.

"We should avoid conserving the site just to make it a tourist
attraction," Budi said.

Earlier this year, the site's front portico partially
collapsed, one of its doric columns is now on a dangerous lean
and many of its 1,300 carved gravestones are either dirty or
broken.

Few people visit the complex due to its disrepair, despite it
containing Dutch tombs from as early as 1799 and numerous
elaborately carved headstones from many eras, including
impressive art deco tombs. Aside from the graves of Dutch and
British colonials, the museum also stores the coffins of former
president Soekarno, vice president Muhammad Hatta, as well as the
graves of student activist Soe Hok Gie and entertainer Miss
Riboet.

A local museum official said the site now saw only 40 visitors
a month. Visitors were often unaware of it because of the thick
wall enclosure that surrounded the complex, he said.

A proposed design from the City Park Agency has suggested the
walls be taken down and replaced with iron fences that would
enable people to see through.

However, seminar participants criticized the agency's design,
which they said would need further studies. (003)