Tumakke: the tongkonan with a roof of stone

Every tongkonan you will see in Toraja is roofed in split bamboo, or in the corrugated metal that has replaced it on most of them. The house at Tumakke is roofed in stone.

It's called Papa Batu, and it stands in Lembang Tumakke in Kecamatan Rembon, in Tana Toraja regency, west of Makale. It's the tenth property in Indonesia's UNESCO tentative-list nomination, and as far as the published record goes it's the only stone-roofed tongkonan left.

How the roof works

The nomination is specific about the material. Slabs of roughly 50 to 60 centimetres long, 30 to 40 centimetres wide, and 5 to 10 centimetres thick, covering the saddle-backed roof form that's otherwise built up in layers of bamboo. The construction of the house below the roof, it notes, is no different from any other Torajan dwelling. A small granary stands about five metres to the north-east.

Indonesian accounts add how the slabs are held on. Each piece is drilled with two holes, one to each side, and lashed to the roof frame with rattan. The stone is described as andesite and padas, and the total is put somewhere in the region of a thousand pieces.

The house is raised on a terrace, and the body of it carries the usual carved boards, with sun motifs, buffalo and geometric patterns.

Why stone, in a region with abundant bamboo, is not something we've found a sourced answer to, and we're not going to invent one.

The age question

Oral tradition puts the house at around seven hundred years, and attributes it to a man named Butu Batu.

We're reporting that as tradition, not as a date. No published independent dating has come our way. Seven hundred years is also, not coincidentally, close to the figure the UNESCO submission uses for the antiquity of the Torajan settlement tradition as a whole, so the two may well be the same claim wearing different clothes.

What isn't in doubt is that the building is old, unusual, and the only one of its kind anybody has recorded.

It is not in good shape

There's academic work on Papa Batu, including a study framing it as a centre for teaching Torajan culture, and a separate piece of research from Universitas Hasanuddin specifically on identifying damage to the structure.

That second one tells you the situation without needing to read it. A stone roof is enormously heavy, timber under it is several centuries old, and this is a house in a district far from anywhere with a conservation budget. It has been recognised as a protected property at provincial level, which is not the same as being funded.

If you go, go gently, and don't treat a fragile building as a climbing frame.

Getting there, and whether to

Rembon is west of Makale, and Makale is already the southern end of the visitor circuit. This is a long way past the point where most itineraries stop, and there's no published visitor information, no hours and no fee.

Realistically this is a place for a second visit to Toraja, or for someone whose interest is specifically architectural. If that's you, it's the single most unusual building in the region and nothing else comes close.

For everyone else, the Palawa compound and its carvings gives you the conventional form beautifully and within easy reach, and why a tongkonan roof matters explains what the roof signifies in the first place, which is what makes doing it in stone remarkable rather than merely odd.

The southern approach is covered in getting to Makale and the south.

We have no photograph of Papa Batu we're able to publish, so this page runs without one.