History of Medan City

However, the founding date of Medan 01 July 1590 has been criticized as `inaccurate’ as the Jakarta Post reported below.
Leaving all the arguments aside of the birth date of Medan, the founding year is right! So we can confirm that Medan is in fact a very old town of 419 years old.

Medan History
The Jakarta Post reports that Historians have criticized the anniversary celebrations for Medan, the provincial capital of North Sumatra, claiming the date was chosen more as a compromise rather than based on historical analysis.
Ichwan Azhari, head of Medan State University’s Center for Social and Historical Studies, said the July 1 anniversary date was completely fabricated and held no historical relation whatsoever with the founding of Medan city.
“To present date historians have found no basis for why July 1, 1590, was the decided birth date of Medan,” Ichwan told The Jakarta Post.

He said a manuscript, Hampatan Perak, did mention the year 1590 as the time when a figure named Guru Patimpus established the first village between the Deli and Babura Rivers in Medan. Still, no exact date was mentioned.
Ichwan said that prior to 1909, Medan’s anniversary was celebrated every July 1, but it was eventually changed to April 1.
This date was upheld for 66 years before it was finally reverted back to July 1 in 1975.
“This action shows we actually have no strong data *regarding the founding date of Medan*. We need to correct this so that we are not deceived by history,” he said.

He said he had raised the matter with both the municipal administration and local legislature but received no response.
The only living member of the committee assigned with determining the founding date, T. Lukman Sinar, said July 1 did in fact have nothing to do with the establishment of Medan.
July was chosen because it was relevant to the history of the Karo ethnic group’s Manteka Kuta (establishing a village), while the 1st was selected because it was simply the first day of the month.
He also said the committee dropped the April 1 choice because the date was set by the Dutch colonial administration.
“There was a very strong feeling of nationalism at that time, so the April 1 anniversary was dropped,” he said.
Personally he had no issue with being criticized for the inaccuracy of the date, he said, and had no problem with changing the date to accommodate history.

Medan City
Medan City is the third biggest in Indonesia. Located in Sumatera-Utara of Indonesia with a total population of 2.5 millions residents. It is said that during day time, the population of Medan City will grow to about 4 millions with people coming from suburbs.
The unique thing about Medan is that, it resides the largest volcanic lake in world known as Lake Toba which is twice the size of it neighboring country of Singapore.

History of Medan Indonesia
Medan started as a village called Kampung Medan (Medan Village). Kampung Medan was founded by Guru Patimpus around the 1590s. As Kampung Medan sits on Tanah Deli (Land of Deli), Medan Village is also referred as Medan-Deli. The original location of Kampung Medan is an area where the Babura River meets Deli River.
Based on the diary of the Portuguese merchant in early 16th century, it stated that the name of Medan was actually derived from Medina which is actually a holy city in the western of Saudi Arabia. However, other sources indicated that the name of ‘Medan’ actually came from Indian language “Meiden”. One of the Karo-Indonesia dictionary written by Darwin Prinst SH published in 2002 wrote that Medan could also be defined as “recover” or “be better”.
The first population of Medan came from the Batak Karo community. It was not until the Sultan of Aceh, Sultan Iskandar Muda, sent his warlord, Gocah Pahlawan Laksamana Khoja Bintan, to be the Sultanate of Aceh’s representative in Tanah Deli, that the Sultanate of Deli started to grow. This growth stimulated growth in both the population & culture of Medan. In the second year reign of Sultan Deli (between 1669-1698), there was a cavalry battle in Medan.

Medan did not change significantly until the 1860s, when the Dutch colonialists began clearing the land for tobacco plantations. Kota Medan quickly became a center of government and commercial activity, dominating development of Indonesia’s western region.
The Dutch governed Tanah Deli from 1658, after Sultan Ismail, ruler of the Kingdom of Siak Sri Indrapura, yielded some of his once-ruled land, Deli, Langkat, and Serdang. In 1915 Medan officially became the capital of North Sumatra Province, and officially a city in 1918.
With the largest volcanic lake in the world, The Legend of Lake Toba , Medan is a city worth visiting for your family vacations in Asia Indonesia