There’s a lot of unusual stuff going on in our world, some of it artistically bizarre, while others, well, simply turned out to be weird. That is the situation with the gigantic, gargantuan, crumbling edifice shaped like a chicken and located in the Indonesian jungle.
While some of you may think a chicken building is a lovely and acceptable structure for a chicken farm, the truth is that the big chicken building served as nothing less than a church. Yes, you read that right: a chicken church.
The locals nicknamed it Gereja Ayam, which translates to “Chicken Church,” yet the structure was never intended to be either a church or a chicken.
It all began when the structure’s creator, 67-year-old Daniel Alamsjah, received a holy vision from God, which inspired him to build a prayer house in the shape of a dove.
‘Perhaps people mistook me for a church because of my Christian religion.’ However, it is not a church. ‘I was constructing a prayer home… a haven for individuals who believe in God,’ the 67-year-old said to the Jakarta Globe. He chose a wooded hill near Maleland to construct the sacred structure, resulting in the world’s strangest-looking church and the most bird-like structure in the world.
The prayer house “stretched its wings” in the early 1990s. The chicken prayer house was not religiously exclusive in the sense that it was open to all religions, including Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians. The upper floors were used for religious services, while the bottom levels were used for rehabilitation and juvenile outreach.
‘The rehabilitation that took place at this prayer home was for therapy for crippled children, drug addicts, insane individuals, and troubled young people who wanted to fight.’
The chicken-dove church, prayer house, rehabilitation center, and everything else that it was had to close its doors in 2000, when extra development expenditures became unaffordable, thus the unfortunate chicken edifice was deserted and left to nature’s mercy.
The chicken church was left to waste for years, with its collapsing walls covered in graffiti, and it became a popular spot for “immoral conduct.” The unfinished basement adds a frightening horror movie feel to the structure.
Alamsjah paid two million rupees (£110) for the 3,000 square meters of land on which the church was built over a four-year period. More than 30 local villages assisted Daniel Alamsjah in constructing the chicken church, and they now benefit from the increased tourism that it has generated.
Gereja Ayam is also a popular destination for tourists and photographers. According to Alek Kurniawan, a travel blogger who inspected the edifice, several of the pillars that support the church are eroding or shattered.
‘This is quite weird, it turns out these rooms are terraced,’ he remarked. The upstairs chamber was converted into a church hall.
“There are rooms such as bedrooms and bathrooms in the basement.” We used a flashlight to search for it because there was no light in the rooms. There could also be bats living there.
“There are 15 rooms, including bedrooms and one with three bathrooms.” There’s one more door we didn’t go through. There is also a lot of graffiti on the wall, like bad words and pictures of naked women.’