Descriptive Text

Van Der Wijk Fortress

Before becoming a fort in the period before 1844 the first building of Van Der Wijk Castle was a VOC trading office in Gombong. The Dutch conflict against Diponegoro in the South Bagelen region in 1825 - 1830 required the VOC to bring in aid and place the reinforcements in the office now referred to as the Van Der Wijk Fortress. Then the building that was originally used as the VOC Office was then converted to Dutch military defense. Resistance to Diponegoro in southern Bagelen even until the earthquake schorched building Kotaraja Panjer Regency as the center of the last strength (1832). This made the VOC office served as the Dutch defense but had not turned it into a fortress.

It was not until 1844 that this building turned into a Dutch fortress. the objective was to prepare the Dutch defense in the war against the sultanate of Yogyakarta. The building was built in 1844 and ended in 1848, then named Fort Cochius/Fort General Cochius which was the name of Lt. Gen. Frans David Cochius, a leader of the Dutch troops who fought in Gombong.

The construction of the fort was led by the Dutch Zeni corp army with 1400 workers, each of which 1200 were from Bagelen District and the rest came from Banyumas. Supervisors came from each region. The fee received by the worker was 15 cents/day for the supervisor to get paid in the form of 1 florin/day. The raw materials of this castle such as calcite and wood were taken from the area around Bagelen and Banyumas.

In 1856 this fort turned into a school named Pupilenschool (School of Military Taruna) for European children born in the Dutch East Indies. Then the name of Fort Cochius chaged to Van Der Wijk Fortress as a tribute to the services of Van Der Wijk in  the field of Dutch Military.