A man hols his father's grave marker.

As the tide rises, an Indonesian village fights to save its dead

The cemetery in Timbulsoko, on the north coast of Java, is sinking beneath the waves. Villagers aren’t ready to let it go.

Mulyono, 61, holds his father's tombstone after removing it from the cemetery in Timbulsloko, a village in Demak Regency, on the north coast of Central Java, Indonesia. As the land subsided and the sea rose, the cemetery was flooded. Mulyono and his family have lost their farmland. They're fishermen now.
ByKurt Mutchler
Photographs byAji Styawan
January 7, 2022
10 min read
This story was produced and published by National Geographic through a reporting partnership with the United Nations Development Programme.

Demak Regency, Indonesia — Indonesian photographer Aji Styawan spent more than four years covering the sinking coast of Demak Regency, in Central Java, for his feature in the July issue of National Geographic magazine. During that time, he visited the village of Timbulsloko, which is not far from his own home, dozens of times. Groundwater extraction is causing the coast in Demak Regency to sink rapidly, even as climate change is causing the sea to rise, and to Styawan, the Timbulsloko community cemetery was a particularly poignant illustration of this situation. It flooded regularly at high tide, making it impossible for residents to visit or bury their dead.

Then in September of last year, the villagers managed to raise the cemetery by about five feet. A government backhoe scraped the necessary mud from the surrounding seafloor, but the villagers did most of the work themselves by hand—removing and later replacing the headstones, leveling the freshly piled mud, and building a bamboo fence to keep it in place. They wanted to preserve their connection to their past and the sweet memories of their ancestors for a little while longer.

“For me personally, I am always stunned because when they are alive, the people are living with the seawater around them even inside their homes,” Styawan wrote in an email at the time. “When they die, they will be buried below sea level. Even though the cemetery has been raised up, still the holes that they dig will have seawater inside.”

Flooded village cemetery in Central Java, Indonesia.
At the end of Ramadan last May, Timbulsloko residents visit the graves of their relatives in the flooded cemetery, reaching it via a long boardwalk. They live surrounded by seawater, which regularly floods their homes. When they die, they are buried at low tide.
Villagers mark the location of flooded tombstones.
As they prepare to add mud to the top of the cemetery to raise it above the high tide line once again, villagers mark the locations of the graves with bamboo sticks.
Man writes his relative's name on a temporary grave marker.
Mulyono writes his relative's name on the temporary marker that will replace the tombstone while the cemetery is being raised.

One of the people he met at the cemetery was Mulyono, 61, who was taking care of the tombstones of his family. His father was buried in this cemetery in 1982, Mulyono told Styawan; his sister Masriah followed in 1988 and his mother, Kharsanah, in 2008. Mulyono and his family had been farmers in this hamlet, and he remembered when it had been surrounded by trees and fertile agricultural land. Now it’s surrounded by seawater. At the cemetery there is just one dead monkeypod tree left.

Once the cemetery had been raised last September, Styawan asked the villagers how long they thought the fresh mud would last. “They said it can be up to two years,” he recalls.

Eight months later, the Timbulsloko village leader told Styawan that the cemetery is already washing away. The woven bamboo fence that surrounded the cemetery had collapsed at the end of 2021, and the cemetery had lost more than six feet (two meters) of soil on all sides. In February, a donor gave the villagers 980 used tires to spread around the perimeter as a makeshift barrier, to ward off the inevitable a little while longer.

Meanwhile, the wooden walkway that leads from the village to the cemetery is nearly underwater at high tide. The water keeps rising.

Flooded cemetery on the coast in Central Java, Indonesia.
As many as 500 people have been buried over the decades in 150 graves at the cemetery.
Excavator moves mud onto a flooded cemetery.
An excavator dispatched by the local government begins digging mud from the seabed to elevate the cemetery. For the villagers of Timbulsloko, saving the cemetery preserves their connection to their past—and is a symbol of respect for their ancestors.
Men hold bamboo fencing to hold mud on a flooded cemetery.
Villagers install a bamboo fence that will retain the mud added to the cemetery and keep it from washing away. The excavator worked for three days—but the villagers did most of the work to raise the cemetery themselves.
A boy removes a grave marker from a flooded cemetery.
Misbah pulls out his relative’s tombstone before the cemetery is raised.
Man holds a grave marker.
Sularso carries his relative's tombstone away from the cemetery. He later gave it a good scrubbing.
Villagers spread mud on a flooded cemetery.
Using hand tools and their bare hands, villagers spread and level the mud dug up from the surrounding seabed by the excavator.
Flooded cemetery in Central Java, Indonesia.
At the end of an operation that took 25 days, the cemetery had been raised five feet and the tombstones had been returned. Within a day the bamboo fence, battered by the tide, had begun to fall apart. The villagers replaced it with another, reinforced with nets—but they worry now, after all their hard work, how long the cemetery will remain safe.
Woman prays in cemetery.
With the elevation complete, Sundari, 48, prays at her husband's grave. Previously, villagers could visit their relatives’ graves only at low tide or by boat. The dead tree stands testament to what was there before the land began to disappear.
This story originally published digitally on January 7, 2022. It has been updated with new text.