- Near the city of Magelang
on the island of Java in Indonesia
you will come upon a massive structure
in the misty rainforests.
It's known as the Gereja Ayam,
or as most people call it, the Chicken Church.
It's truly a fowl site.
(musical chiming)
Before we start, I just wanna give a huge shout out
to writer Theodora Sarah Abigail
who did some original reporting and wrote an amazing piece
on the Chicken Church for Atlas Obscura.
It is linked in the video description below
and was hugely influential in making this video.
So thank you.
Rumors of this building have been on the internet
for a long time.
People thought maybe it was some kind of
crazy Dutch colonialist building,
maybe it was some kind of cult,
maybe it was haunted.
What it actually is, is the product of a dream.
Many of our best ideas come to us in our dreams
and in the case of Daniel Alamsjah,
it happened in 1988.
After saying his nightly prayers,
he received a vision of a dove with snow-white wings
resting atop a hill.
A voice told him to build a place of worship
for all peoples, regardless of faith.
When he woke up he was like,
"Yeah, I'm not actually gonna do that."
But the vision kept nagging at him.
He couldn't stop thinking about it
and a couple of years later he went to visit a coworker
who took him to this hilltop.
Daniel watched the sun rise on Rhema Hill and it happened.
As soon as Daniel saw it, he knew that this
was the hill from his dream
and after a little more praying,
Daniel bought an acre of land on the hill
for 3.5 million rupiah, or about 2,000 dollars.
Keep in mind that Daniel was not
this crazy wandering mystic or outsider artist.
He worked as a project manager for a chemical company.
It's not the background you might expect
for someone who went on to build a prayer house
after having a vision.
And it wasn't simple either.
The first four years were just consumed with the paperwork
of getting permissions
to actually build something like this,
but in 1992 he was able to break ground
and he got a 30-person crew together
and he started building his vision.
This huge dove-shaped building,
which would be open to all kinds of people
with all sorts of different religious beliefs.
As you might see by the iconography,
a dove, a crown, Daniel's a Christian
in a country that's 80 percent Muslim.
So people were a little bit suspicious of this project
and it shows up in the name, the Chicken Church.
Is this some kind of giant Christian cult thing?
Daniel kept trying to tell everyone,
it's not a chicken, it's not a church,
it's a place for all of us to come together.
But in truth, the complaints were the least
of Daniel's issues.
In 2000, he just ran out of money.
He'd already built this enormous structure.
The exterior was there,
but he couldn't finish any of the interior.
He had to leave.
He had to basically abandon it in the forest
and over time, it became overgrown
with vines and trees started growing inside of it.
People came and did graffiti
and it really did start to feel like the remnants
of some crazy chicken cult that someone had been running.
(rooster crowing)
This is where you come in
and by you, I mean, the internet.
15 years later, after Daniel had had to step away
and the Chicken Church had been largely falling into ruin,
it showed up on the internet.
This incredible, strange, abandoned space.
Pictures of it showed up on Huffington Post.
They showed up on Atlas Obscura.
It started to make the rounds
and something kind of incredible happened.
For a long time, you know, a dozen people
would show up a week.
Suddenly it went from a trickle to a flood.
Daniel was making as much as 2,000 dollars a week
from the one-dollar tickets sold to the visitors.
And over the last few years,
the Chicken Church has undergone
this incredible resurgence
and it's still improving.
He has turned these empty concrete rooms
into beautiful mural-covered spaces.
And today, you can not only climb through the church
and stand on the crown,
but you get a free piece of fried cassava in the cafe
located in the butt of the Chicken Church.
What a good deal that is.
The Chicken Church has actually come back.
It's come to be what he envisioned.
It is literally, in large part thanks to the internet,
a dream come true.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
Subscribe to the channel to see other amazing places
all over the world
and tell me about what incredible dream project
you would build in the comments.
I have always wanted to build some kind of elaborate
art installation behind a waterfall,
but I'd love to hear what your weird crazy
dream project would be.