The long ride from the international airport to the city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java at least has the virtue of easing a jet-lagged traveler through a liminal zone of rice-paddy plains and jungle hills. Then the buzzy metropolis closes round, and everything is all business and hot tropical urban disarray. Streets thrum with a zillion scooters in what was once nicknamed “kota sepeda,” bicycle city.
Only a tiny percentage of the millions who flock to overtouristed Bali make a side trip to Yogyakarta. It’s a place of cultural and intellectual ferment, dense with universities, run by a revered royal family. It’s not easily parsed, which makes it, over several days, a great city to explore.
The first thing you notice, after the scooter swarms, are the food stalls, the warungs, which range from tiny stands to de facto outdoor restaurants. These line almost every street and alley, often obliterating sidewalks, with banners boasting that this jackfruit stew (gudeg) has impeccable recipe provenance, or that here one eats “legendary” satays of young goat.
I spent more than two weeks exploring Yogya, but began with the food, moving from warung to warung and then to restaurants, over several days. I was steered to them by Tiko Sukarso, 39, a Jakarta transplant who ran a Yogya restaurant until Covid ended it, and now operates a sort of pop-up cooking club. I ate fried noodles (bakmi goreng) at this warung, fried free-range chicken (ayam goreng kampong) with sweet-hot sambals at the next. For one 7 a.m. breakfast I found the warung of Bu Sukardi, who makes wobbly-soft tofu in a fiery infusion of ginger and palm sugar (wedang tahu).
On one evening, to show the more formal side of Yogya eating, Mr. Sukarso met me at the ornate Javanese restaurant Griya Dhahar RB, set in elaborate open pavilions with carved teak chairs, where we had classic dishes like brongkos telur, a coconut-milk stew of cowpeas, tofu, boiled eggs and a lemony-bitter herb called melinjo.
“We love peanuts,” Mr. Sukarso said. “We love something fatty in a sauce, like peanut sauce on gado gado or lotek.” (Those are salads that often include chewy tempeh.) “That’s in our root palate. Something nutty, creamy, fatty, sweet, something fermented.”
Between meals, I went to museums, many art galleries, a huge annual contemporary art show, a morning market, countless barista-style coffee shops for iced revivers, a classical dance performance and a drag cabaret in a steamy space above the floor devoted to Muslim clothing in the city’s most famous batik emporium, the Hamzah Batik store. The classical dance involved exquisite hand gestures and halting body movements set to a gamelan orchestra. The drag show was a joyful blast of pure pop camp, where fans in hijabs posed for selfies with the drag stars.
One reason I was back in Yogya for the first time since the 1980s was the designation in 2023 of a sliver of the city as a UNESCO World Heritage site. called the Cosmological Axis. The site was built in the 18th century by a sultanate that still governs the region politically and spiritually. It comprises structures, details and symbols of a syncretic mix of animist, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim beliefs that put Yogya at the center of the universe.
The area, enfolded by the city, seems modest, even discreet. It includes a small monument, many gates, some fortifications, a low mosque, a lovely complex of now-disused baths and gardens called the Taman Sari, or Water Castle, and two pairs of sacred banyan trees. At its heart is the Kraton, a multibuilding palace on grounds planted with trees, airy and elegant, part of which is occupied by the 10th sultan of Yogyakarta and his administration. One building houses an animated display about the cycles and rituals of Javanese life. In an open pavilion, daily dance and puppetry shows happen, the most beautiful of which is a Sunday-morning practice dance, where performers receive instruction from masters — a privileged, intimate thing to witness.
One thing emerges, if you slow your tourist pace, paying attention in the Kraton and the nearby Sonobudoyo museum: Yogya culture is intricate, inward-turning, rhythmic, preoccupied with symbology, always needing a good decoding. The most famous local dance performance is of the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic, but how does this fit into a Muslim country where mosques sound the predawn calls to prayer seemingly on every block? One sees hijabs everywhere, but what would authorities in Mecca make of those hijab-wearing drag-show fans?
Two religions, two temples
For breathtaking spectacle, head to the ancient temple complexes outside the city called Prambanan and Borobudur, two magnificent constructions honoring related religions, built within 100 years by related kingdoms, soon wrecked and abandoned, then uncovered and restored, now treasured, each a UNESCO site.
Prambanan is a giant collection of volcanic-stone Hindu structures, dating to the ninth century. Its largest temples, ringed by relief carvings, are climbed to gain entrance to rooms containing statues of Shiva, Ganesha, Durga and more. The site was mostly destroyed not long after construction, probably by the eruption of nearby, still-active Mount Merapi. Of the 240 original temples, only a few central ones were reassembled in the 20th century, so that the site is strewed with countless piles of the rubble of lesser buildings. It’s a place where the universe of human creativity confronts the creative destruction of, if not the destroyer Shiva, then the earth itself.
Thirty miles away, even closer to the volcano, is Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. It was also most likely built in the ninth century, to be abandoned after a few hundred years in the decline of Buddhism and rise of Islam. Here, as the Berkeley-educated Buddhism scholar Hudaya Kandahjaya put it to me, is a “pile of Dharma,” meaning made not so much for worship as instruction. It’s almost 400 feet square and 10 levels high. Visitors ascend from the lower peripheries, studying carved panels about earthly temptation, to the unadorned top, representing enlightenment, where there are three levels ringed by 72 large, bell-shaped hollow stupas, which you can peer into to see figures of the Buddha.
After the axis and the temples, I had a stroke of luck. I met a famous artist, Siti Adiyati, 72, of locally royal lineage. When I asked about the Cosmological Axis she invited me to her home. Ms. Adiyati is a social activist who in the 1970s rebelled against the Indonesian academy at Yogya’s prestigious art school.
In the outdoor pavilion of her large home compound, she had drawn a huge infographic on a dry-erase board. Here was the Kraton and its cosmic appurtenances, including eight gates of symbolic significance. Note, she said, how the axis points north to the intemperate Merapi. To the south is the open sea, home of a goddess who looms large in local mythology. Ms. Adiyati had also drawn mandalas, including mandala-shaped Borobudur. There was a cartoon of a human body, relating to gestures of Hindu and Buddhist origin that Ms. Adiyati learned as a student of Javanese dance when she was young.
“This,” she said, waving at her intricate work and laughing, “is me.” By which she meant her city, too.
Villages within the city
“If you are alone, you can work fast,” the artist Rangga Purbaya, 48, explained one afternoon as we drank coffee near an enormous banyan tree at the Jogja National Museum, a contemporary art space (which uses the old spelling for the city’s name). “But if you are in a group, you can go far.”
Mr. Purbaya, whose photo-based art often deals with the victims of the anti-communist mass killings of 1965, many of them from central Java, was explaining the communal spirit of the city, represented in part by its many artists’ collectives — of which he manages one.
Many people insisted that Yogya is a slower, more communal city than it seems when dodging scooters. Nona Yoanisarah, 32, an artist who has a side gig improving A.I. outputs for an American company, said: “Yogya is more calm, more slow, more soft; it’s different. It’s a small city, but in a big way.”
To feel that, one must walk the kampongs. These are the villages within the city, clusters of homes in mazelike layouts of narrow streets. Kampongs should be walked without destination. One sees well-fed cats on the prowl, chickens ranging for bugs, songbirds in delicate cages, walls and doors of lovely hues and countless potted plants.
One of my favorite kampongs includes the area east of the Water Castle and the Pasar Ngasem market, an area infiltrated by some tourist shops but still lovely and various in its architecture as it bumps up against old royal walls and buildings. The other is the kampong near the Masjid Ghedhe Mataram mosque in the old-city area of Kotagede. This 18th-century mosque, the oldest in the city, should be seen for the architectural stylings of its gates and walls, which incorporate Hindu motifs that have long influenced Javanese design.
Then walk east and south through a warren of homes. The kampong begins wealthy (try a fancy coffee at the Longkang Kotagede cafe, or find the funkier, banyan-shaded Legian cafe), and then drifts south into an area of trees, animals and shambolic shared spaces, where it evokes a timeless country village.
Having seen the temples, sampled the warungs, walked the kampongs, and imagined the Cosmological Axis, you are now a certified Yogya visitor. As one world-traveling local resident, who lived in Sacramento and Chiang Mai, Thailand, among other places, told me, “The tourists who do come to Yogya come back.”
It’s Yogya’s universe, we just visit it.
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