Traditional tongkonan of Toraja Land

The tongkonan are the traditional houses of the Toraja people of South Sulawesi. They are a lot like those of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra (see my piece here from last year: Minangkabau housing ). But the latter were said to be modelled on buffalo horns. The Torajan style, I was told, was about the traditional boats on which the ancestors had arrived, probably from West Sumatra.

They still build a lot of their houses in this style, though the new ones tend to have steel roofs. The older ones are thatched, and maybe have green vegetation growing on them.

A village will generally have one or more houses with a huge collection of buffalo horns, representing all the buffalo sacrifices made at funerals, and thus the status of the place.

Sometimes I saw a funny mixture of old and new building styles in a village. A lot of Torajans have travelled to other parts of Indonesia, earned good money, and come back wanting to live in greater comfort than the older style probably afforded. They would still keep the traditional house for ceremonial purposes though.