Martin Wickramasinghe Museum

Martin Wickramasinghe’s childhood home nearly didn’t survive to become a museum at all. In 1941, the entire village of Koggala, including his family house, was razed to make way for a wartime Royal Air Force base, and only his ancestral home, spared by chance, remained standing to tell the story of the rural world that shaped Sri Lanka’s most influential modern writer.

A House That Survived a War

Lama Hewage Don Martin Wickramasinghe was born on 29 May 1890 in the village of Malagama, part of the wider Koggala area, in a house set between a coastal reef and a mangrove-fringed lagoon dotted with small islands, a landscape that would later populate his most celebrated fiction. He spent his childhood exploring that lagoon and its islands before eventually settling in Colombo as an adult, working as a journalist and going on to become widely regarded as the father of modern Sinhala literature.

In 1941, as the Second World War reached the Indian Ocean, the British established RAF Koggala on land taken from the village, and virtually the entire settlement, including most of Wickramasinghe’s childhood surroundings, was demolished to make way for the airbase. His ancestral home survived, one of the only structures from the old village left standing, and it was formally returned to him in 1962 under the government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. It had long been Wickramasinghe’s hope that the property could eventually house a folk museum and library, a wish realised only after his death in 1976, when the newly established Martin Wickramasinghe Trust began collecting folk art and artefacts, opening the museum to the public in 1981.

A Writer Who Reshaped Sinhala Literature

Wickramasinghe’s influence on Sri Lankan literary and intellectual life extended well beyond fiction. His clear, accessible writing style tackled subjects ranging from anthropology and linguistics to philosophy, Buddhism, and evolutionary biology, and his groundbreaking 1934 book “Sathva Santhathiya” introduced Darwinian evolutionary theory to Sinhala readers at a time when the concept remained novel even in much of the academic world. His novels, drawing heavily on the rural, coastal world of his Koggala childhood, were eventually translated into multiple languages, extending his reach well beyond Sri Lanka.

What’s Inside the Museum

The complex combines Wickramasinghe’s preserved ancestral home, over 200 years old, with a dedicated folk museum documenting the rural southern Sri Lankan life he wrote about so vividly. Visitors move through interconnected rooms organised by theme: traditional fishing tools, agricultural implements, brass and jewellery-making crafts, colonial-era crockery, antique kitchen utensils, and a particularly popular section featuring mannequins dressed in period clothing spanning different historical eras. A dedicated collection of Kolam masks and traditional puppets showcases performing arts traditions from the region, while larger exhibits too big for indoor display, mostly traditional boats reflecting Koggala’s coastal identity, are shown in an open-air area at the end of the tour.

Visiting Tips

• Photography is generally not permitted inside the main house, though it’s allowed in the surrounding grounds; check current rules on arrival.
• A small on-site bookshop sells Wickramasinghe’s works, a good starting point if you’re new to his writing.
• Combine with a visit to Koggala’s beach and lagoon, the very landscape that inspired much of his fiction.
• Entry fees are modest for locals and higher for foreign visitors; budget accordingly.

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