Trincomalee

The great harbour made Trincomalee. Tamil tradition places the Koneswaram temple on Swami Rock in remote antiquity, and the surrounding country holds Buddhist monastic ruins of similar age, so the headland has been a sacred and strategic point for far longer than any European record. Medieval South Indian dynasties and the kings of Polonnaruwa in turn endowed and fortified the site, and the port traded with India and beyond.

The Portuguese arrived in 1622, destroyed the temple and used its stone to build a fort on the headland. The Dutch took the harbour in 1639 and rebuilt the works; for the next two centuries Trincomalee changed hands repeatedly, held at different moments by the Dutch, the French and the British, who renamed the fortress Fort Frederick and turned the anchorage into the principal base of their eastern fleet. In April 1942 Japanese carrier aircraft bombed the harbour and the airfield, sinking ships offshore; the war graves near the harbour date from that campaign. Britain handed the base over after independence, and in the 1950s divers recovered the old temple's lingam and other images from the sea; they were reinstalled when the rebuilt Koneswaram was opened in 1963.

The civil war hit the district hard. Trincomalee's mixed population — Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese — made it a contested prize, and from the 1980s the city saw killings, displacement and long periods under curfew, while the surrounding countryside changed hands more than once. The 2004 tsunami then destroyed villages along the coast and caused heavy loss of life in the district. Since the war ended in 2009 the port has been expanded and the beaches north of the city have been rebuilt for visitors, though land and resettlement questions remain unsettled.

Trincomalee is one of the most mixed cities in Sri Lanka, and its skyline shows it: gopurams, minarets, church spires and the white domes of Buddhist stupas stand within a few streets of each other. Tamil is the main language of the city, with Muslim communities who also speak Tamil, and Sinhalese neighbourhoods and villages nearby; many residents move between two or three languages in a working day.

The Koneswaram temple anchors the religious calendar, with its annual festival and a steady flow of pilgrims from across the island and the diaspora, and the cliff beside it, Lover's Leap, carries its own legends. Hindu practice here is Saiva, with kovil processions, chariot festivals and firewalking at some village temples. The Muslim towns of Kinniya and Muthur keep the fasting month and the Eids, and Buddhist pilgrimage draws visitors to Seruwila and Girihandu Seya. Carnatic music and bharatanatyam are taught in the city, and the east has its own Tamil dialect and folk traditions, distinct from Jaffna's.

Manners are conservative and hospitable. Modest dress is expected in town, shoes come off at shrines, and invitations to eat are pressed warmly. The war remains close to the surface in a city where every community lost people, so commemoration is handled carefully and is a subject on which visitors are better listeners than talkers. Cricket is followed everywhere, and the seafront at Dutch Bay is where the city gathers in the cool of the evening.

About a hundred thousand people live in the city, with a wider district of some four hundred thousand spread around the bays, the paddy land and the coast. The city is the capital of Trincomalee District and a provincial administrative centre, so government offices, schools and the hospital employ a substantial part of the workforce.

The harbour underpins the rest. The port handles cargo, the navy keeps a major base, a colonial-era tank farm above the inner harbour stores fuel, and cement and other industry sits around China Bay. Fishing is the other constant: boats work the deep water outside the harbour and the lagoons behind it, and the morning catch sets prices in the market. Inland, the district grows rice, coconut and vegetables, and tourism along the Uppuveli and Nilaveli strip has become an important employer since the war, though it stops almost entirely in the monsoon.

The day starts early and pauses in the heat of the afternoon, before the seafront and the shops fill again towards evening. Incomes are lower than in the west of the island, many households depend on relatives working in Colombo or the Gulf, and the economic crisis of 2022, with its fuel queues and price rises, was felt sharply here. Water supply, the state of rural roads, and unresolved questions about land taken during the war are recurring local issues.

Trincomalee eats the food of the Tamil and Muslim east, hotter and more heavily spiced than the south-west. Rice and curry is the midday staple, with a fish or crab curry dark with roasted spices, dhal, a fried vegetable and a coconut or onion sambol. Crab curry, nandu kari, and prawn curries are the dishes to look for, made with shellfish from the harbour and the lagoons, and eaten with rice, pittu — steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut — or string hoppers.

Breakfast and the evening meal lean on the South Indian repertoire: thosai and idli with sambar and coconut chutney, string hoppers with fish curry, and vadai sold by the bagful, including the flat lentil vadai eaten with a fried chilli. Kottu roti, chopped on a steel plate with a rhythm that carries down the street, is the late-night meal everywhere. Muslim kitchens in the city and across the bridge in Kinniya make biryani, mutton curry and short eats, and watalappam, a set custard of jaggery, coconut milk, eggs and spices, at festival times.

The sea supplies the rest. Seer fish, tuna, squid, prawns and reef fish are grilled or devilled at the beach restaurants, and dried fish flavours curries inland. Palmyra and coconut products, buffalo curd with treacle, and mangoes in season round out the local table, and king coconut, thambili, is sold from roadside stalls all day.