Hari Batik Nasional
Next: October 2, 2027
Wear your batik today.
The story
Where it comes from
On 2 October 2009, at a meeting in Abu Dhabi, UNESCO inscribed Indonesian Batik on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Indonesians at home and abroad celebrated by wearing batik that day, and on 17 November 2009 President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree (Keppres 33/2009) making 2 October Hari Batik Nasional, National Batik Day. It is not a public holiday. It honours a craft in which artisans draw patterns on cotton or silk in hot wax, dye the cloth, and repeat for every colour.
How it's celebrated
The custom is simple: wear batik. Ministries, city governments, offices and schools ask staff and students to come in batik on 2 October, often favouring hand-drawn batik tulis and stamped batik cap over printed imitations. Craft institutes hold batik markets and talks, and many people post photos of themselves in their best batik on social media.
Did you know
- UNESCO notes that batik follows Indonesians through life: babies are carried in batik slings with designs meant to bring luck, and the dead are wrapped in funerary batik.
- Batik patterns show influences from Arabic calligraphy, Chinese phoenixes, Japanese cherry blossoms and Indian or Persian peacocks.
- A batik education programme run by the Batik Museum in Pekalongan with local schools was also chosen by UNESCO in 2009 as a model of good safeguarding practice.
Coming up next
- Gaecheonjeol (National Foundation Day) · October 3, 2027
- Pierre Bonnard's Birthday · October 3, 2027
- World Animal Day · October 4, 2027
- World Teachers' Day · October 5, 2027
- International Geodiversity Day · October 6, 2027
- World Cotton Day · October 7, 2027