Sri Lanka's forgotten east coast — singing fish, lagoon light, and Tamil culture
Batticaloa is the main city on Sri Lanka's east coast — a place that bore some of the heaviest damage of the civil war, was devastated by the 2004 tsunami, and has quietly been rebuilding ever since. The lagoon that wraps around the city is famous for its 'singing fish' (the phenomenon of musical sounds rising from the water around the Dutch-built bridge at full moon, attributed variously to molluscs, fish, or the structural properties of the bridge's stonework). The beaches north and south of the city are among Sri Lanka's best and least crowded, and the Tamil culture here — different in cha…
Batticaloa was settled by Tamil-speaking people for centuries before the Portuguese built a fort here in 1628, followed by the Dutch (who rebuilt the fort in 1665) and the British. The city was the second-largest Tamil city in Sri Lanka after Jaffna and suffered greatly during the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) — it changed hands several times and civilian casualties were high. The Boxing Day 2004 tsunami hit the east coast of Sri Lanka catastrophically, killing over 10,000 people in the Batticaloa district alone. The end of the war in 2009 and reconst…