Jaffna: The North Has Opened and You Should Go

Jaffna sits at the northern tip of Sri Lanka and for a long time it was not accessible in the way the rest of the country was. That has changed. The highway north is now complete, the train to Jaffna runs daily, and the city has been rebuilding itself with a quiet determination that is palpable when you walk its streets. Visiting Jaffna now, while the reconstruction is still visible alongside the recovery, is to see something honest about what resilience actually looks like.

The Jaffna peninsula is flat and dry, the landscape defined by palmyrah palms, lagoons, and the particular quality of northern light that is harsher and more direct than the south. The architecture of old Jaffna is distinctly different from the rest of Sri Lanka — the Tamil domestic architecture of colonnaded verandas and high-ceilinged rooms, many of these houses now restored or in the process of becoming something again.

Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil is the most important Hindu temple in Sri Lanka: an enormous, active, strikingly beautiful complex that draws devotees from across the country and the Tamil diaspora worldwide. The annual festival in August is one of the most visually overwhelming religious events in the country — days of processions, fire-walking, kavadi dancing, and the kind of devotion that is entirely genuine and completely absorbing to witness.

The islands of the Jaffna peninsula — Kayts, Karaitivu, Nainativu — are reached by ferry and largely untouched by tourism. Nainativu has a Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple on the same small island, both active, both drawing pilgrims. The ferry ride across the lagoon to reach them is as much of the experience as the temples themselves.