Kalisusu Bay

Kalisusu Bay sheltered the coastal centre of Ereke in northern Buton, on routes connecting the eastern and western islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The headland offered vessels a place to escape rough weather in the Banda Sea. Its maritime position also exposed the community to raiding and pressure from neighbouring kingdoms, giving protected settlement and local authority a particular importance.

Oral accounts place an earlier seat at Wapala, hidden within the bay. The later fortified landscape at Ereke includes the Kalisusu stronghold and religious remains associated with the region's transition into an Islamic political world. Kalisusu eventually belonged among the territories linked to the Buton sultanate, whose relationships with Ternate and other powers shaped control of the surrounding islands. A seventeenth-century dispute between Buton and Ternate shows that those affiliations could be contested. The bay consequently served both as practical shelter for sailors and as the maritime setting of a locally governed centre within a larger network of alliances.