Depok

Depok

Depok (Pegon:ديڤوك) is a landlocked city in West Java province. It is located directly south of Jakarta within the Jakarta Metropolitan Area in Indonesia. It has an area of 199.91 km2. It had a population of 1,738,600 at the 2010 census[2] and 2,056,400 at the 2020 census;[3] the official estimate as at mid 2023 was 2,145,400 (comprising 1,080,541 males and 1,064,859 females), resulting in a density of 10,731.8 people per km2.[4] Depok was created as a separate city on 20 April 1999, having previously been part of Bogor Regency. It constitutes the second most populous suburban city in Indonesia (after Bekasi), and the tenth most populous suburban city globally. There are two possible origins of the name 'Depok'. The first is that it the region was already known as Depok when the land was bought by Cornelis Chastelein, a senior official in the Dutch East India Company in 1696 and that on 18 May 1696, a former VOC officer Cornelis Chastelein bought land with an area of 12.44 km2, 6.2% the area of today's Depok. Besides cultivating the area with industrial plants with the help of the locals, Chastelein was active as a missionary, preaching Christianity to the indigenous Indonesians. To this end, he established a local congregation named De Eerste Protestante Organisatie van Christenen (DEPOC). In the 1950s, the claim that this acronym led to the modern name for Depok emerged among the community of people from Depok living in the Netherlands.[5] An alternative explanation for the name is that it comes from the Indonesian word padepokan, meaning 'shrine', as the location had been used as a religious retreat before Chastelein's purchase of the land.[6] Before his death on 28 June 1714, Chastelein had written a will that freed the slave families of Depok and gave them pieces of his land, converting slaves into landlords. In 1714, the 12 slave families became landlords (forever as given to them with entitlement deeds of the owner Chastelien in his will) and freed men, women, and children. The freed slaves are also referred to as the Mardijker's – the word Merdeka meaning freedom in Bahasa Indonesia. June 28 is designated as Depokse Daag (Depok Day) by the original Depok family, and on 28 June 2014, commemorating 300 years, they formally opened a 3-meter height monument on its own land, but it was prohibited by the Government as it referred to Dutch colonialization.[7]