Why I Keep Coming Back to Yogyakarta

The bridge. That’s what I want to say when a friend asked why I choose to stay here.

I was four at that time. My aunt, Tante Tiwik, was a student in Yogyakarta, and she had brought me and my sister Dini along to the city where she was studying. There were four of us in the becak: Tante Tiwik, her friend, Dini and me, which is about two more than a becak is designed for.

The sky started to darken, the lights on the sideways flickering and the rickshaw transport us lazily crawling through the empty street. Few pools of water splashed, emitting a pleasant sound as we crossed that bridge. The scent of the after rain is so strong in the air and there is a stoic patience of the city. “Easy,” it says. Like I don’t need to worry about my destination.

That simple frame of the bridge somehow imprinted in my brain and never leave. I left the city a week later and carry on, hearing the story here and there from the distance, moved from one island to the other island within the country.

What I remember most clearly, more clearly than the bridge itself, is the sound. Not the picture, which memory has overwritten and rebuilt so many times that I can’t trust it anymore. The sound of water against stone, the rickshaw’s creak, and Tante Tiwik and her friend talking quietly above our heads, in no hurry at all. Nobody was in a hurry.

Four-year-olds don’t understand cities. They understand feelings. And the feeling of Yogyakarta, compressed into that single crossing of a bridge on a wet evening, was this: you can slow down here. The city will wait.

Yogyakarta history as a city is quite well documented. 400 years ago, a commoner without a king bloodline named Sutawijaya rebelled against his foster father and build his own kingdom right in the middle of Java island. Kingdom come, kingdom go they say. There is more powerful one come before his, but nothing last more. It retains its structure even after the whole country declares itself as a republic.

In 1946, Indonesia capital moved temporarily to Yogyakarta, before moved back again to Jakarta. Later this city becomes one to the most important education hub in Indonesia but never able to grow itself beyond that.

This is the peculiar thing about Yogyakarta. It had every chance to become something bigger. It was a former capital, a cultural center, and home to Gadjah Mada University and dozens of other institutions that produce the country’s doctors, engineers and bureaucrats. And the city politely, stubbornly said no thank you.

Some businessman and woman I know whispering their disdain about how hard it is to build a business in this city and push for changes. There is this story about the plan to build a highway to Yogyakarta that almost botched as Sultan think that small merchant wouldn’t be able to sell the merchandise if the plan comes true.

The Sultan, Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, is central to this resistance. He’s also the governor, the only governor in Indonesia who inherits the position instead of being elected. He’s a king inside a democratic republic, governing by tradition. When he decided that the highway would hurt the warungs and small traders along the old roads, that wasn’t nostalgia. It was governance, of a kind that quarterly earnings reports can’t measure.

I respect this, even when it frustrates me. Especially then. The frustration forces you to ask whether your idea of progress is actually progress, or just speed.

This is a city that resistant to change. And business hates that attitude.

It’s not only the old guard, but the young one also think and view the same. One of the most famous slogans of the city, “Yogya Ora Didol” (Yogyakarta is not for sale) is part of the people verse and help to understand why you can’t find a skyscraper building here.

The student culture is inseparable from the city’s identity. Walk through Prawirotaman on any evening and you’ll see groups of twenty-somethings in too-big t-shirts, smoking kretek on the steps of guesthouses that cater to European backpackers and local artists in equal measure. They argue about politics. They play guitar badly but with commitment. They run poetry readings in someone’s rented room.

Babarsari, where the design and IT campuses are, is more commercial. The internet cafes that used to line the streets have been replaced by coworking spaces, but the fundamental economy is the same: young people renting cheap rooms, eating cheap food, building skills they’ll take somewhere else.

And that’s the paradox. Yogyakarta is a city that produces ambition but can’t always contain it. The best graduates leave. They go to Jakarta, to Singapore, to wherever the salaries match the talent. The city watches them go with the calm of someone who knows they’ll be back. Not all of them. But enough.

Enough come back to open restaurants in Kotagede that serve traditional Javanese food with a twist learned in Melbourne, or studios that design products sold globally. Enough come back to raise children in neighborhoods where the rent is still reasonable and the pace allows for actual parenting, instead of the frantic logistics that pass for family life in Jakarta.

The square which located in the front of the palace is one of the most bare squares you’ll ever see. No fountain, no solid paving covering it, no garden, nothing. While every year there is a celebration happening, most of the day it spends its time being a single rectangular square with two trees in the middle, and solid soil cover most of the surface.

I love that square because it doesn’t perform. Any other city in Indonesia would have turned it into a selfie spot with LED lights and a hashtag. Yogyakarta keeps it empty, apart from the occasional kid flying a kite and the occasional confused tourist who’d been promised something more and couldn’t see that the emptiness was the something.

It captures the essence of the city. In the world that always changes, and technology close the distance and border, it prefers things to remain the same and accessible for the commoner.

A paradox really, as a lot of student coming to Yogyakarta and most of them are quite progressive. Yogyakarta is used to see the student antic who doing strange things to understand themselves and become very tolerant in the process. People quick to forgive if you clip them while driving, and generally doesn’t care whether you are Muslim, Christian, or just an atheist.

Each neighborhood is different. Timuran, where the old Javanese aristocracy lives in houses with teak pillars and courtyards that haven’t changed in a century. Demangan, with its university boarding houses and the perpetual smell of instant noodles at 2 AM. Kotagede, the original capital of the Mataram Sultanate, where silverwork shops operate in buildings older than any nation in Southeast Asia.

And Pakuningratan. My Pakuningratan. Where I spent six years working in a colonial building that felt more like home than any house I’ve ever rented. But that’s another story.

Each one keeps its own time. The city doesn’t move as one body. It’s more like a cluster of small villages, connected by the same roads, the same Sultan and the same agreement that speed is not a virtue.

It what makes me fall in love with Yogyakarta and always come back again here. I’m coming back 14 years after I cross that bridge and then left for Jakarta. I’m coming back again 25 years later when I’m a little bit older and decide to build my family and career here.

Someone who I admire says that you should not put an attribute to yourself. Detach yourself from the origin, hobby or your company. Detach all of your attributes as it would stifle progress and put a blind in front of your eyes to the further change. While I love this idea and can relate to it, the realisation that I will keep coming back to this city make me accept that Yogyakarta already become part of my identity.

In 2002, a few days after I take care of all of the university paperwork, I decided to take my time to wander around. I walk passing through the famous Tugu and Malioboro and then decided to go to east from a point called “Yogyakarta Zero”. Two minutes walking and I stunned to saw it. The bridge. It’s still there! I recognize it as the back of my hand. It doesn’t change a single bit, become extremely loyal to the image that glued to my four years old body. I remember it when I was 4, and I started to believe it when I was 18.

I stood on that bridge for a long time. I think I was crying, though I wouldn’t have admitted it then. It wasn’t sadness. It was something I didn’t have a word for at eighteen, recognition maybe, the shock of finding proof that a memory is real. I’d carried that bridge in my head for fourteen years without being sure it had happened, because I was so small and the world was so large. And there it was, under my feet, unchanged.

The city gave me that without meaning to, just by being a place that doesn’t rebuild its bridges to make room for wider cars, and trusts the original stone to hold.

More than infrastructure, a city is more deeply coloured by its content. The people here. The activities. The way they drive. The way they earn money. The way they greet each other. It gives me a particular feeling of flow. This is a city of the present that keeps lingering in the past tense. A place where a warm melancholy retained as it’s people relentlessly trying to stop the time.

They won’t succeed, of course. No one does. The malls are creeping in from the north. The ring road gets more congested each year. The angkringan are slowly being replaced by coffee shops that serve pour-overs at prices that would have seemed obscene a decade ago.

But the creep is slow. The resistance holds. And every evening, when the light does that specific Yogyakarta thing, going amber and then purple and then dark blue over the rooftops of Malioboro, I cross a bridge somewhere in the city and I’m four years old again. The rickshaw creaks. The water splashes. The air smells like rain.

Easy, the city says.

I’m still here.