Kattankudi is a small city in Eastern province of Sri Lanka, notable for being one of the most densely populated cities in South Asia and the most densely populated Muslim region in the world. It was the site of the Kattankudy mosque massacre of 1990.
Kattankudy is a one hundred percent Muslim populated township in Sri Lanka located along its eastern coastline, about 530 kilometres away from the capital city, Colombo. This township is surrounded by the Bay of Bengal to the east, the Batticaloa lagoon to the west, and by two large Tamil settlements, one in the south, Araiyampathy, and the other in the north, Kallady, which lies adjacent to the provincial town of Batticaloa, a heavily Tamil dominated municipality. Demographically, Kattankudy is the most densely populated town in Sri Lanka with 40,298 people and 10,691 families, according to the 2003 census, crowded within an area of 6.5 square kilometres. This population density of nearly 6,200 square kilometres is more than double the average of 3,043 for the whole country. However, according to some leading local residents of this township, the total population currently stands at nearly 50,000, which makes the density even more cramped.
However, the number of Muslims in Kattankudy must have received a big boost in the seventeenth century when the Buddhist King Senarath of Kandy signed a Peace Treaty with the Portuguese in 1617, following which the 4,000 Muslim traders seeking asylum from Kotte and Sitawaka territories that were under Portuguese occupation, settled along the eastern coast of his kingdom.
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