Surabaya

Surabaya traces its founding to 31 May 1293, when forces of the Javanese prince Raden Wijaya defeated a Mongol expedition near the mouth of the Brantas; the city still celebrates that date, and the shark and crocodile of its emblem come from the legend behind the name. As a river-mouth port it served the Majapahit empire and then, after Islam reached the north coast, became a sultanate in its own right and one of the busiest trading towns in Java. The Dutch East India Company took an interest early, and by the mid-18th century the port was in Dutch hands.

Under colonial rule Surabaya grew into one of the largest cities of the Dutch East Indies and held the colony's most extensive naval base, with sugar from the interior, tobacco, shipyards at Tanjung Perak and a European quarter laid out to the south. It was heavily bombed and then occupied during the Second World War.

The city's defining moment came after the Japanese surrender. British Indian troops landed in October 1945 to disarm the Japanese and were met by armed republican youth; their commander, Brigadier A. W. S. Mallaby, was killed on 30 October, and after an ultimatum the assault on the city began on 10 November. Thousands died in weeks of fighting, the nationalist broadcaster Bung Tomo became a national figure, and 10 November is observed across Indonesia as Heroes' Day. Surabaya spent the later 20th century as an industrial port, and since the 1990s has spread west and south into new housing and toll roads.

People here call themselves Arek Suroboyo, the children of Surabaya, and their reputation in Java is for plain speech. The local dialect of Javanese does away with much of the elaborate politeness used in the court cities of Yogyakarta and Solo, and directness is a point of pride rather than an embarrassment. The city's own theatre form, ludruk, is comic and improvised, performed in the Surabaya dialect of Javanese and opened by the Remo dance.

Surabaya is also a city of layered communities. Sunan Ampel, one of the nine saints who brought Islam to Java, is buried beside his mosque, and the quarter around it has been Arab for centuries; the Chinese quarter near the Red Bridge is just as old, and a mosque built in the manner of a Chinese temple near the city hall, named after the admiral Zheng He, marks the overlap between them. Madurese families, many of them traders and labourers, make up a large part of the population and bring their own food and music.

Football matters enormously: Persebaya's supporters, the Bonek, fill the Gelora Bung Tomo stadium in green, and match days colour the whole west of the city. The military and naval presence is strong, remembrance of 1945 is taken seriously, and heroism is a civic theme rather than a historical footnote.

About 2.9 million people live within the city limits, by the 2020 census, and more than ten million in the ring of towns around it — Sidoarjo, Gresik and the industrial corridor down towards Mojokerto — which together form the country's second largest metropolitan area. The economy runs on the port at Tanjung Perak, one of Indonesia's busiest, on shipbuilding and heavy engineering, on trade and wholesale markets, and on hospitals, universities and government offices serving the whole of East Java.

Most residents live in kampung, dense low-rise neighbourhoods threaded with alleys, where doors stay open, children play in the lanes and the city's long-running competitions for the greenest kampung have filled them with potted plants. The day starts before dawn with the call to prayer and ends late; scooters dominate the roads, and much of the eating and socialising happens outdoors after sunset, when the heat loosens.

The constant complaints are heat, traffic and flooding: the city is flat and barely above sea level, and heavy rain backs up in the drains. Successive administrations have widened pavements, planted parks and reworked the bus network, and a well-known initiative lets passengers pay for a ride on the Suroboyo Bus with plastic bottles. Migration from Madura and the East Javanese countryside continues to feed the city's growth.

East Javanese cooking is saltier and hotter than the sweet food of Central Java, and petis, a thick black paste of fermented shrimp, is behind much of the local flavour. The city's signature dish is rawon, a beef soup coloured almost black by the keluak nut, served with rice, bean sprouts, salted egg and prawn crackers. Its most challenging is rujak cingur, a salad of fruit, vegetables and boiled cow's snout dressed in petis — a dish few visitors order twice but one the city is genuinely proud of.

Other staples are lontong balap, rice cakes with bean sprouts, fried beancurd and lentho fritters; tahu tek, cut-up beancurd and egg under a petis and peanut dressing; sate klopo, beef skewers grilled with grated coconut; and lontong kupang, tiny clams served as a soup with rice cakes. Semanggi, clover leaves dressed in a spicy sweet-potato sauce, is another speciality of the city.

Sweets and drinks lean to the Dutch and Chinese inheritance: kue lapis Surabaya, a three-layered cake, is a standard birthday and wedding cake, and cold es degan, young coconut water, is the answer to the heat. Bakeries in the Arab and Chinese quarters sell martabak and steamed buns late into the night.