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Keywords: painting

Batuan Village

Batuan Village of Ancestral Spirits.
For over a thousand years Batuan has been a village of artists and craftsmen, old legends and mysterious tales. Batuan recorded history begins in A.D. 1022, with an inscription that is housed in the main village temple, Pura Desa Batuan. The name Batuan or Baturan mentioned here prompts villagers to joke about being tough as stone or eating rocks as batu means stone in Balinese. But it likely refers to an ancient megalithic tradition in which standing stones served as meeting places and ceremonial sites for the worship of ancestral spirits. Because Batuan became a center from which Buddhist priests and brahmans spread to the main court centers of south Bali, the village has an unusual preponderance of brabmans. DeZoete and Spies, in their famous book Dance and Drama in Bali, describe it almost entirely a brahman village.