Our wedding ceremony

cleanomic

Apr 22, 20142 min read

My husband and I have a Javanese heritage background; Western and Central Java of Indonesia to be exact. So, when we first decided to getting married we agreed to incorporate some traditional Javanese aspects into our wedding. We then opted to wear West Java’s attributes for the ceremony and Central Java’s for the reception.

The ceremony or ‘Akad’ is basically a religious ceremony where my husband declares his oath to be married with me before the State official and my father. For this Akad, we wore a traditional Western Javanese costumes to pay respect on my mother’s side of family who are originally from West Java. The crown that I wore called “Siger”, and that was a real jasmine flowers they put on my head. It smelled amazing and was incredibly heavy.

The makeup was exceptional. I had to wake up at 3 am to be ready at 8 am sharp. I didn’t really quite understand why it took nearly 5 hours to put on the costume and finish the makeup. To be honest, I was almost freaked out when I saw myself in the mirror after the makeup was finished because it was very heavy, it felt like there were 10 cm of foundation layers on my face. Fortunately, it looks okay on the pictures and I quickly realized that we did need the makeup since the spot light towards us were pretty intense throughout the wedding day.

Akad - the ceremony 1 (asking parent permission) jpeg

Akad - the ceremony 2 (saying the oath 1) jpeg

The ceremony was the main event of the wedding. All of our family members and close friends attended the ceremony and it was very sacred and solemn. I was pretty much crying (out of happiness of course), particularly the moment where I had to ask my father’s blessing before asking him to hand me over to the man I chose.