BURGHERS Archives

Where have all the Burghers gone? – By Pelham Juriansz The word “Burgher” is a very strange word indeed. In fact some might wonder at my name wondering if I am some sort of “Sudda(white man), having a strange foreign name. The name Jansz is a more familiar name but not Juriansz. Then people are familiar with the names of Brohier, Muller, Ludowyke, etc, because of R.L. Brohier, Carl Muller and Professor E.F.C. Ludowyke, all of whom are distinguished writers. As the Dictionary mentions, the word “burgher” means citizen-derived from the word “Burgh” of “Borough”. But, few people are aware that it has a racial connotation- that it refers to descendants of European settlers in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. In the European Middle Ages, a burgher was any freeman of a burgh or borough; or any inhabitant of a borough, a person who lives in town. (Even in modern German the word ...

BURGHERS, In the Land of the Palmyra Palm, JAFFNAPATAM It has to be a most interesting book. Nothing to do with “The Jam-fruit Tree” & other books written by another Muller (Carl), but a comprehensive study of “Ceylon-Burghers” (meaning “Citizens of a Burgh/Town), in this case, Jaffna, the Northern tip of “My Lovely Island Home”, as I call her. This excerpt itself is very long, but still very interesting, in that it is especially a debunk of what is “DUTCH-BURGHERISM”. While taking nothing away from the original script, I have decided to EDIT this excerpt simply to “shorten” the story for easier reading purposes. The beginning of the Burgher Community in Jaffna, began with the Portugese occupation of the Peninsula, led by Dom Andre Furtado de Mendoca (there’s a long one, for you) in 1591, further consolidated by it’s annexation in 1619 under Dom Filepe D’Oliveira. One of the main ...