Gereja Ayam: The Unfinished Chicken Church Near Borobudur

Somewhere on the hills about three kilometres east of Borobudur there is a building shaped like a bird, with its beak open and its tail cocked. From most angles it reads as a chicken. A few read it as a dove. Almost nobody calls it by its real name, which is Bukit Rhema, and which translates roughly as the hill of the first.

It is one of the strangest buildings in Central Java and one of the easiest to fit into a day, which is a strange combination for something so unusual.

Who built it, and why

The man responsible is Daniel Alamsjah, a Christian businessman from Jakarta. According to the account in The Guardian’s piece on the site, he had a vision late in the 1980s of a bird-shaped building on a hilltop, and was told in the vision that it should be a place of worship for all faiths. Some sources date the dream to 1988, others to 1989, so it is safer to say the late 1980s.

Some time later, walking in the jungle around Magelang, he recognised Bukit Rhema as the hill from the vision. Within a week he had bought an acre of land on top of it.

What he built was not a chicken. His stated design was a giant crowned dove, a bird of peace, intended as a prayer house that would welcome people without distinction of ethnicity, religion or group. He was explicit about that. The nickname Gereja Ayam, or Chicken Church, exists because a crowned dove with its beak open happens to look, to most people, like a hen that has just been startled.

Ten years of weekends, then fifteen years of neglect

Construction began around 1990. Alamsjah was working full-time as a project manager in Jakarta, and for nearly a decade he spent every weekend travelling to Magelang to supervise it. Permission was hard won. The local resistance was real. But according to the Guardian, the structure eventually went up.

Then the money ran out. Work stopped in 2000. The building was left unfinished and began to decay, and for years it was described as graffitied and abandoned.

Here is the genuinely strange part of the story. Over the following fifteen years, visitors to Borobudur started hearing about this abandoned building a few kilometres away and going to look at it, because they could not believe the photographs. Word travelled. Visitor numbers climbed. Alamsjah eventually came back, started charging a small entrance fee, and resumed work on the place. Decay turned into a revival. The building now has painted cloud ceilings, decorated floors, murals of scenes from Indonesian mythology, twelve small prayer rooms in what are called the catacombs, a souvenir shop, and a cafe in what the descriptions delicately call the chicken’s rear. You can climb to the top and watch the sunrise from the crown.

The most recent addition to the building’s long filmography is the 2016 Indonesian film Ada Apa dengan Cinta? 2, which used it as a location. Werner Herzog also gave it a segment in his 2016 documentary Into the Inferno.

The question this site cannot answer for you

There is a reason to be uneasy about all of this, and it is worth stating plainly.

The builder’s stated intention was interfaith. The place was conceived as open to anyone, and it still contains prayer rooms that people use. But it is also unfinished, financially precarious, and now ticketed — a visitor attraction built out of the decay of someone’s personal religious project. Charging admission to an abandoned prayer house is not obviously the same thing as what the man who started it set out to do.

There is no simple answer here. Alamsjah appears to have made his own decision to reopen it, and he is the one running it. But if the idea of paying to enter someone’s unfinished chapel troubles you, that is a reasonable reaction and you are entitled to act on it. You can see the building from the road on the approach, which is free, and that is genuinely most of the experience: the shape is the point, and the shape is visible from outside.

If you do go in, treat it as what it is, which is both a tourist site and a place of prayer. Dress modestly. Keep your voice down in the prayer rooms. Ask before photographing people or anything that looks like an actual ceremony. Do not climb on the structure or touch it to get a better picture.

Practical notes

The site is in the villages of Karangrejo and Kembanglimus, Borobudur sub-district. It is close enough to Borobudur to combine with the temple in a single morning, and it sits on the same high ground as Punthuk Setumbu, which makes it easy to pair with a dawn start on the hill.

Figures for the entrance fee vary online and none that we have found are current enough to trust. Carry small cash and expect to pay something modest at the gate.

The climb to the top is steep but short. Most of the effort is in the heat and in stairs rather than in distance.

If you are combining it with a heritage day, the Borobudur temple guide covers the main site properly, and the Borobudur tickets and Structure Climb guide covers what to book and what it costs. This is a twenty-minute detour from the road, not a replacement for either.

One warning about expectations: the building is far more striking in photographs than in person. In life it is a partly finished concrete shell with a good view. People who come expecting a polished attraction are sometimes disappointed. People who come expecting something strange and slightly melancholy tend to like it.

Where to pair it

The natural pairing is Punthuk Setumbu — climb the hill for dawn, then come down and pay your respects to the chicken. Borobudur itself is a short walk or ride away, and if you have a longer day, the Wanurejo craft village nearby is a good use of an afternoon.

For a broader look at how tourism and conservation money relate in this region, see the sustainable travel guide.