About Jogjakarta / Yogyakarta

Yogyakarta (pronounced ‘Jogjakarta’), known and called Yogya or Jogja for short, is the soul of Java. That if you compared Jogja / Yogya with the other city like Jakarta, the financial and industrial powerhouse. As central of the Java/s artistic and intellectual heritage, Jogja / Yogya is the place where the Javanese language is at its purest, Java’s arts at their brightest and its traditions at their most visible.

By history, Jogja / Yogya was the centre of the Mataram Dynasty (1575-1640), and until now the kraton (the sultan’s palace) exists in its real functions. and fiercely independent and protective of its customs, Yogya is now the site of an uneasy truce between the old ways of life and the trappings of modernity that have swept across the island in recent decades.

Still headed by its Sultan, whose Kraton (The Sultan Palace) remains the hub of traditional life, contemporary Yogya is nevertheless as much a city of burger bars, traffic jams and advertising hoardings as batik, gamelan and ritual. But while the process of modernisation homogenises many of Java’s cities, Yogya continues to juggle past and present with relative ease, sustaining a slower, more conservative way of life in the quiet kampung that thrive only a stone’s throw from the throbbing main streets.

Today, Jogja / Yogya still remains as Java’s premier tourist city. The city has numerous thousand-year-old temples as inheritances of the great ancient kingdoms, such as Borobudur and Prambanan. And for accommodation, the city has countless hotels and restaurants of its own. More than the cultural heritages, Yogyakarta has beautiful natural panorama.