Holidays in Indonesia

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Indonesia

The Sound That Took Four Hours to Stop Traveling

At 10:02 in the morning on 27 August 1883, the third and most powerful of four climactic explosions tore apart the volcanic island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. It remains, by most measures available to modern acoustics, the loudest sound ever recorded in human history. On the island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius, 4,800 kilometres away, people reported hearing what sounded like distant cannon fire, unaware that the noise had travelled roughly one-thirteenth of the way around the planet's circumference to reach them; in Perth, Western Australia, more than 3,000 kilometres in the opposite direction, people heard the same detonation.

The eruption's pressure wave, an entirely separate phenomenon from the audible sound itself, was picked up by barometers as far away as London, and circled the globe more than three times before finally dissipating, arriving at Calcutta six hours and forty-seven minutes after the initial blast and reaching Mauritius, Melbourne and Sydney within eight hours. Two-thirds of the island collapsed into the sea during the eruption, and the resulting tsunamis, some reportedly as tall as 41 metres, killed an estimated 36,000 people along the coasts of Java and Sumatra. The vivid, unusually intense sunsets that volcanic aerosols produced across Europe in the weeks that followed were documented as far away as Norway, where painter Edvard Munch is widely believed to have drawn on his own memory of the post-Krakatoa sky when he painted the blood-red backdrop of "The Scream" a decade later.

Two Independence Days, Eighty Years Apart in Recognition

Sukarno read Indonesia's proclamation of independence aloud at ten o'clock in the morning on 17 August 1945, just two days after Japan agreed to surrender to the Allies and end its wartime occupation of the Dutch East Indies. The Netherlands refused to accept it, launching a series of military campaigns to reclaim its largest colonial possession, and four years of sporadic but often brutal fighting followed before the Dutch finally transferred sovereignty on 27 December 1949, a date the Netherlands continued to treat, for more than seven decades afterward, as Indonesia's true independence day.

That position only shifted in June 2023, when Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told parliament that his government now recognised 17 August 1945 "completely and without reservation" as a historical fact, seventy-eight years after the original proclamation. A spokesperson immediately clarified that the acknowledgement carried no legal consequences and that the Netherlands would still treat 27 December 1949 as the formal date sovereignty changed hands, an arrangement that leaves Indonesia, in the words of legal experts consulted at the time, having spent four full years in the odd position of being independent without being formally sovereign, a gap in recognition that has still never been fully closed on paper even as both countries mark 17 August every year in practice.

A Capital Built to Finish on a Centenary

Jakarta, Indonesia's capital since the country's founding, is sinking, with parts of its northern districts subsiding by as much as twenty-five centimetres a year due to decades of excessive groundwater extraction, making it one of the fastest-sinking major cities on Earth. In 2019, President Joko Widodo announced that the government would abandon Jakarta as the seat of government entirely, relocating the capital more than a thousand kilometres away to a purpose-built city on the island of Borneo, in East Kalimantan province, to be called Nusantara, an old Javanese word roughly meaning "the outer islands."

Construction broke ground in July 2022, and the government deliberately timed the new capital's symbolic inauguration for 17 August 2024, Indonesia's Independence Day, even though the roughly thirty-five-billion-dollar project was still, at that point, little more than a construction site occupied mainly by government buildings and the first few thousand relocated civil servants. The full build-out is planned across five separate phases and is not expected to be complete until 2045, a date chosen deliberately to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the independence Sukarno proclaimed in 1945, turning the entire multi-decade relocation project into a single, extended countdown toward the country's own centennial.

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