Roviana oral tradition traces the founding of the chiefly polity and the fortification of the ridge-top stronghold on Nusa Roviana to a legendary chief-hero remembered as Ididubangara. He is bound up with the origin of the coastal Roviana chieftainship, whose people are held to have come from the inland Kazukuru, and with the sacred stone platform and shrine complex, hope pukerane, on the island's spine, where later bangara traced their descent and mana. Sources preserve the tradition in variant forms, and the line between historical ancestor and mythic founder is not sharply drawn.