Tana Toraja

tanah torajaTo get to Toraja, you’ll find yourself driving through spectacular mountains, steep terraced slopes and tall bamboo forests before arriving in a true paradise of unspoiled natural beauty. Witnessing all that, you’ll have no trouble understanding why Torajans believe their forefather descended from heaven. The center of tourism in Tana Toraja is Rantepao, 328 km north-east of Makassar, sitting 700 m above sea level. Rantepao has cool, pleasant evenings. The entry to Tana Toraja is marked by gate built in traditional boat shaped style. The road passes the spectacular mountains of Kandora and Gandang on which, according to Toraja mythology, the first ancestors of celestial beings descendents from heaven. This form belief created a unique Christian-animism culture in Toraja Society. Their ancestors worship include elaborate death and afterlife ceremonies, which are essentially great feast for everyone, A strict social hierarchy is followed in the villages and for an important figure wedding and burial ceremonies can take days to perform.

Toraja’s Tomae
Tomate (funeral) literally means ‘dead person’ and of all Torajan ceremonies, the most important are those concerned with sending a dead person to the afterworld Without proper funeral rites, the spirit if the deceased will cause misfortune to its family,

Funeral are sometimes held at the rante, funeral sites marked by one or more megaliths. In Tana Toraja, there are several arcs of groups of roughly hewn stone slabs around villages and each stone possibly represents a member of the noble class who lived and died there. Some are as high as 4 m, symbolizing the importance of the deceased.

Families spend much on these tomates and if you’re fortunate to e here for a burial ceremony you should be sure to contribute something such as food, soap or perhaps even money. Be warned thought, some parts of the ceremony are not for the faint hearted, the slaughter by single word stroke of a scared buffalo is considered quite common.

In Toraja, tomates usually last about a week with the feasting, chanting, and dancing continuing throughout the night. It is on the last day that coffins hauled carefully up the mountains side to the family gravesite amidst great shouting and excitement. The best known grave sites are at Lemo and Londa. Here the effigies are those if noblemen and other high ranking community leaders. At Lemo, burial chamber are cut out of the rock and several balconies filled with tau tau overlook new caves being dug to serves as family graves.

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