From the first to the sixth batik cloth, her eldest sister, crown princess GKR Mangkubumi, asked the audience, “Is it already appropriate?”

“Not yet!” the crowd answered.

Only after she had put on the seventh cloth with a striped pattern – symbolizing the vertical relationship between humans and the Creator as well as the horizontal ties among fellow humans – did the audience shout, “It’s appropriate!”

The procession, called pantes-pantes (propriety), is part of the two-hour mitoni ceremony Javanese moms-to-be go through as they reach the seventh month of their first pregnancy. The ceremony comprises of 19 stages ending in a feast. Each stage carries a symbolic message and prayer to God for the safe passage of the mother and her firstborn.

This tradition is said to originate in the period of King Jayabaya, who ruled the Kediri Kingdom in the 12^th century, when Hindu culture was dominant. A royal couple, Sadiya and his wife Niken Satingkeb, after nine stillbirths, asked for guidance from the king on how to be blessed with a child. King Jayabaya, so the legend goes, ordered the couple to perform a ritual that later became known as mitoni or tingkeban, named after Niken Satingkeb.

Nine centuries later, many Javanese families, including the royal family of the Yogyakarta Palace, still carry out the mitoni ritual to express gratefulness to God and pray for the health of the mother and child.

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