When Pira Thiru proposed to Linnea Thiruketheeswaran Røsjø on a hike near Oslo in July 2023, the couple already knew one thing: there would be no standard Norwegian wedding. Pira, a tech entrepreneur born to Sri Lankan parents in Norway, and Linnea, who works at Amnesty International Norway, wanted a celebration their future children would one day look at and see both halves of their heritage. So in July 2025, they flew 140 guests to Bentota on Sri Lanka's southwest coast for a two-day, two-ceremony wedding — and their planning choices are a useful playbook for anyone eyeing a destination wedding on the island.
Their first move was hiring a Colombo-based planner, Hemant Dadlani, after getting little response from venues directly. His Instagram portfolio and vendor network won them over, and the couple credits him with making the whole weekend feel safe and smooth. For the venue, they picked Villa Bentota, a 15-room property they could buy out entirely — big enough to house immediate family, small enough to feel intimate, with gardens for the Hindu ceremony and the beach for cocktails. A bonus: a brightly coloured commuter train runs right through the grounds, which the bride likened to a Wes Anderson film set.
Logistics shaped everything. There are no direct flights from Oslo to Colombo, so the couple chose a venue just 90 minutes down the coast from the airport rather than the north of the country, where Pira's family is from. They announced the wedding within weeks of the engagement and sent save-the-dates nearly two years ahead — and guests responded enthusiastically, many treating the trip as the holiday of a lifetime.
They also gambled on timing. July falls in one of Sri Lanka's monsoon seasons, but Norwegian workers barely get time off outside summer, so they booked anyway — and got three days of sunshine, with rain holding off until each party ended. The priest at their Hindu ceremony declared it a sign from the gods.
The celebration itself was a study in blending cultures. Day one was a vibrant Hindu ceremony in traditional Sri Lankan dress, with red-dominant florals, marigolds, and a vegetarian lunch served on banana leaves, eaten by hand. Day two was a Western civil ceremony: a white Pronovias gown, a black tux by Norwegian designer Magnus Beckmann, and decor inspired by the couple's blue-and-white Christmas dinner plates at home. Vows were read in Norwegian, ceremonies conducted in English, and speeches given in Tamil so everyone felt included.
Food leaned proudly local — curries, dals, snake gourd salad, coconut water straight from the shell — with a tiered white wedding cake as the single concession to tradition. Music came in waves: a Hindu ceremonial band, a string-and-sax ensemble, a party band, and a DJ spinning Tamil hits with dancers, capped by fireworks booked just three days out.
Afterwards, guests scattered across Asia or lingered in Sri Lanka, while the newlyweds honeymooned on the south coast in Matara, near the Sigiriya rock fortress, and up in Jaffna, Pira's family homeland. A year later they welcomed a daughter — and the wedding photos now serve as her first lesson in where both sides of her family come from.
