Reception room? Now THAT'S a reception room!

In the other room at home here in Sydney, they're watching that rather sad little English TV show, Escape to the Country. The funny little houses they try (and usually fail) to sell all seem to have 'reception rooms' these days.

When I grew up in England we had a living room, and a front room for special occasions, maybe for when you were receiving visitors. They were both pretty small. Now they have 'reception rooms', courtesy of the real estate agents. And they're often just as small.

When I was in Solo and Jogja the other week, I saw what real reception rooms looked like. What the sultans of those ancient Javanese royal families used when they had visitors to entertain. They probably still use them sometimes - there are still sultans living there, and in at least the case of the Jogja one, they're still very well respected and influential.

The top picture is of one of the (many) reception rooms in the royal palace in Solo (Surakarta), and the next two are in Jogja's main palace

To complicate matters, each city has a second royal palace where a lesser strand of royalty has set up home. I didn't visit these lesser palaces, to keep it all a bit simpler for me. And tonight, reading up on Wikipedia (so it must be right), I find that it's become even more complicated in the last few years. The Solo sultan who died in 2004 left no wife but lots of mistresses and dozens of potential heirs, who were fighting in the streets for their inheritence and possession of the palace! Here's one journalist's take on it:

SOLO, Indonesia — Pop quiz: How many kings are there now in the ancient sultanate of Surakarta?

Justin Mott for The New York Times

Answer: There is no correct answer.
When King Pakubuwono XII died four years ago, he left six mistresses with 35 children, but no wife, no heir and no instructions about the succession here in this city in central Java.
He might have guessed what would happen. Two half brothers each claimed the ancient crown, and the family split into two bitterly feuding factions.
The oldest half brother and his nine full siblings took control of the palace, a fortresslike complex called a kraton. He barred his 25 half siblings — the children of the other five consorts — and evicted those who had made their homes within its walls.
Except for one shouting match when the expelled half siblings stormed the palace and had to be removed by the police, the two factions have not spoken since.
Now people are asking what will become of the centuries-old Sultanate of Surakarta. Also known as the Sultanate of Solo, it has had no political power outside of the thick, whitewashed ramparts of the palace since the Republic of Indonesia stripped all royal families of power in 1946.
But the kraton here sees itself as a keeper of Javanese tradition — of purity, refinement and cosmic spirituality — and has continued to perform court rituals and to hold regal processions through the city.
Its royal family, meanwhile, continues to behave as royal families so often do.
“Palaces have many intrigues, you know,” said one of the evicted princes.

Meanwhile in Jogja I think it's all holding together a bit better. They certainly do a good palace tour for tourists like me. I paid about $1, and got entry to large areas of the place, an interesting museum, and several reception rooms. I was assigned my own personal guide (a dear old lady who could hardly walk and who had been on the Sultan's staff for maybe all of her 82 years). I also got to watch an excellent little concert, yes, in one of the grand reception rooms, featuring a gamelan band and a traditional palace dancer.

Solo pursuits 2: Java Man

A few kilometres north of Solo is the village of Sangiran. It's here that the best specimens of Java Man remains were discovered in the late 19th century, and it's here they've built a museum about him.

Java Man was hailed as one of the 'missing link' species, bolstering support for Darwin's recently published evolution theory. Examples have been dated at nearly 2 million years to about 140 thousand years before the present, and found subsequently in lots of places around the world.

The Sangiran museum has a lot of  educational stuff about evolution generally, as well as documenting and housing some of the local finds. It also has a few references to Homo floresiensis, 'yang sangat problematis' ('which is highly problematic'). The problem, as I understand it, is that while almost all the world's archeologists consider the 'Hobbit' to be a distinct species of tiny hominid which survived on Flores until fairly recently, this was hotly contested by the top Indonesian paleoanthropologist. Teuku Jacob is dead now, so his name can be blackened. He's said (by the foreigners at least) to have stolen the exhibits, damaged a valuable specimen, and had the cave where it was found blocked off so he couldn't be proved wrong. My Indonesian isn't good enough to work out what the Java Man museum's official line is on the controversy.

I got to Sangiran very easily by public bus and motorcycle pillion taxi, and spent a comfortable hour or two wandering through the galleries, enjoying the airconditioned respite from the heat outside.

Homo erectus (Java Man) is the third from the left on their illustration below.

Wanna see my slides? - I've been to Java too!

And what a trip it was. I went to Central Java, specifically Solo City, the Dieng Plateau, and Yogyakarta (Jogja), to fill in a missing link in my Indonesia travels.

There were sultans' palaces, bicycle tours of the padi fields, a gamelan foundry, bird markets and countless other market scenes. There were the ancient Hindu temples at Prambanan, volcanic bubbling lakes, brightly painted mosques galore, and joyous festivals, marches, and gatherings of all kinds.

There was a world record giant batik production event. There was my night ascent of the 2911m Mt Merapi volcano. There were happy crowds of weekend domestic tourists on the beach and elsewhere. And there was the 'Idul Adha' Muslim Day of Sacrifice festival, where I was welcomed warmly.

Most of all there were friendly souls everywhere. What a wonderful place. What wonderful people. We probably don't deserve such good neighbours

 

I'll write up a few of my adventures in more detail over the next few posts.