Jaffna

Jaffna is a city on the Jaffna Peninsula in northern Sri Lanka, capital of the Northern Province and administrative headquarters of Jaffna District, with a population of 88,138 recorded in 2012. From the early 14th century it became the seat of a Tamil kingdom that endured, with interruptions, until the early 17th century; it fell under Portuguese rule in 1619, passed to the Dutch in 1658 and to the British in 1795, and its name derives from a Portuguese adaptation of a Tamil phrase meaning port of the lyre. Jaffna was a stronghold of a Tamil separatist insurgency from 1983 and was recaptured by Sri Lankan government forces in 1995, an operation that left parts of the city in ruins.