Culture · Essay
Trunyan: the village where the tree does the work
One Balinese village neither cremates nor buries its dead. At Trunyan, bodies are laid in bamboo cages beneath a great tree whose fragrance is said to still the air, and the skulls rest on a stone shelf above the lake. On Bali's oldest answer.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-23 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
Everything Bali is famous for doing with its dead, the towers, the bulls, the fire, one village on the island has never done. Trunyan sits on the far shore of Lake Batur, inside the caldera of a volcano, reachable for most of its history only by boat, and its people, the Bali Aga, the "original Balinese", kept the customs the rest of the island had before Hindu Java arrived.
Their answer to death is neither fire nor earth. Across the water from the village, in a small lakeside grove, the dead lie on the ground.
The practice is precise, not casual. The qualifying dead, and the qualification matters, are taken by boat to the sema wayah, the old cemetery: a walled grove beneath a huge, ancient tree the villagers call the taru menyan, the fragrant tree. The body, wrapped in cloth, is laid in a shallow depression and covered with a tent of woven bamboo, a ancak saji, open to the air. There it stays. No earth is mounded; no fire is lit.
The grove's famous property, and the thing every visitor reports with disbelief, is the absence of what should be overwhelming: the site does not smell of death. The village credits the taru menyan, whose resinous fragrance is said to take up the air's burden, and the tree stands at the centre of the village's account of itself, its scent, in the founding story, being what drew Trunyan's ancestors to this shore in the first place. When time and the grove have done their work, the skull is lifted to a long stone shelf beside the path, joining the rows facing the lake, eleven cages in the grove at a time by custom, the ground turning over slowly across the generations.
Not everyone comes here. The grove receives only the village's completed lives, those who died married, of natural causes, their bodies whole; the unmarried, and those taken by accident or violence, are buried in separate grounds. The old cemetery is not a default. It is a rank.
Set against this library, Trunyan is Bali's sky burial: the body surrendered to the open air rather than transformed by fire or hidden in earth, with a natural agent, birds there, a tree here, trusted to keep the arrangement decent. Like the Zoroastrian towers, it draws hard boundaries around which deaths qualify; like the Greek and Chinese second burials, it ends with clean bone given a permanent, honoured shelf. The elements repeat across the world; Trunyan's combination, and its tree, are its own.
And the villagers have watched their custom become a spectacle, boatloads of visitors crossing to photograph the skulls, the practice recast as macabre curiosity. From inside, it is nothing of the kind: it is the settled, graded, carefully ruled way a small community has honoured its completed dead for perhaps a thousand years, in confidence that the tree, the lake and the village would all still be there. Of the three, only the village remembers names.
The skulls on the stone shelf are Trunyan's archive, and they share the limit of every archive of bone in this library, from the ossuaries to the ñatitas: the rows outlast the labels. Which skull was the boatbuilder, which the woman who sang, is knowledge the shelf cannot hold; it lives in the village's telling, generation to generation, in a settlement small enough that the telling has, so far, held.
Most families are not villages. Their telling scatters with every move and every death, and needs a shelf of its own, one that holds stories rather than skulls. A family archive like Confinity is that shelf, and Trunyan's grove is a fair description of what it should feel like to use: a quiet place, kept by the family, where the completed lives are laid out in honour, facing the water.
The grove