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Published: November 5th 2012
Spent the night at the Thilaka Holiday Home in Anduradhapura – don’t know where Feroze gets these cute little guest houses from – but they are all small (under 10 rooms), clean and friendly.
Today was spent finding our around the ancient city of Polonnaruwa. For three centuries it was the royal capital of both the Chola and Sinhalese kingdoms and its life started last in the 10
th century. In 1982, UESCO added this ancient city to its World Heritage list.
It continued to rain during the morning but by the afternoon we were soaked through – umbrellas were really only used to try to keep our cameras dry. Even the souvenir sellers were having a hard time and by late afternoon we all decided it would be a better option to go home and have a couple of shots of arrack to warm us all up.
So some time spent in the Archaeological Museum was a welcome relief from the wet weather. I liked the museum and it gives you a good introduction to what you are about to see on the sites. The museum is designed so you walk from one end to the other, passing
through a series of rooms, each dedicated to a particular theme of the ancient city: the citadel, the outer city, the monastery area, Hindu monuments, etc. There are scale models of what the buildings would have looked like as well as displays of artifacts found within the ruins.
The Royal Palace was a huge place and thought to be seven stories high and measured approx. 31m by 13m. The walls were 3m thick and probably had about 50 rooms – the rooms seemed to be quite small but all joined by corridors down each side of the structure.
The Audience Hall is decorated with a frieze of elephants – them is in a different position…there are also lions at the top of the steps.
Not far away was the King’s bathing pool – situated a little away from the palace down in a nice quiet area it also had attached to it a private changing room Nice…I spend a lot of time contemplating the pomp and ceremony that would have taken place for the King to move from the Palace to the bath…..
There is an area called the “Polonnaruwa Quadrangle” which has a lot of
interesting and reasonably preserved buildings. In here we saw:
1. The Vatadge with its outermost terrace of 18m in diameter and the second terrace has four entrances flanked by guard stones. The four entrances lead to the central dagoba with its four Buddha’s.
2. The Thuparama Gedige – which means a hollow Buddhist temple with thick walls – and it also has its roof intact. The building has strong Hindu influences as well there are several Buddha images in the inner chamber.
3. The Gal Pota – which means stone book. It is a very big slab of stone representing a book and is nearly 9m long and 1.5m wide and weight about 25 tonnes and history tells us that it was “dragged” here from about 100km away….how, I wonder. The writing apparently tells of the virtues of the king at that time.
4. The Hatadge – a tooth relic chamber (and we will see a few of these in our time in Sri Lanka).
The tooth relic gained prominence as a religious symbol and is said to be from the Buddha.
5. The
Latha-Mandapaya – I liked this area as it was a little different from the others because its stone pillars were shaped like lotus stalks. It was a little away from the other buildings and seemed a quiet place to reflect – history states that people sat within the enclosure to listen to chanted Buddhist texts.
The ancient city is really spread out and Feroze waited it out in the dry and warmth of the car – but he drove us from place to place each time…we would jump it all wet with dripping umbrellas fogging up the car on him…….so, other places we visited were…..
6. The highest building in the group was the monastery abbot’s convocation hall. It has 17m high walls, although the roof has collapsed. The cathedral-like aisle led to a huge standing headless Buddha.
7. Gal Vihara is a group of four beautiful Buddha images all cut from one long slab of granite. The standing Buddha is 7m tall and the reclining image of the Buddha is 14m long – and the grain of the stone makes them most memorable. The two other images are both of the seated Buddha.
8. The Potgul Vihara – has think walls but it is a hollow dagoba-like building…it is thought to have been used to store sacred books and is commonly referred to as “the library.”
It was a long, wet day and a little confusing – all that history that I never expected and I have spent some time reflecting on what it would have been like to live in that great city at that point in history…just close your eyes and imagine the people (traders, kings, servants, monks, etc), their clothes, ceremonies, sounds, etc……amazing……hope you enjoy the photos and I don’t apologise if I have gotten a few of them mixed up…you will get the idea.
Oh, and some nice bright shots to finish off this blog……we went to visit this wood carving factory…another excuse to get out of the rain for a short while…..this carved elephant is out of one piece of timber (about 400 years old I was told)……really nice work from the craftsman using all different types of wood….everyone was buying an elephant image of course.
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