The sight is stupendous even today: a massive monolith of red stone rises 600 feet from the green scrub jungle to accentuate the lucid blue of the sky. How overpowering, then, this rock fortress of Sigiriya must have been when it was crowned by a palace 15 centuries ago.
Ruins of the fabled palace spread across the very peak of the “Lion Rock” - so named, perhaps, because visitors formerly began the final harrowing ascent through the open jaws and throat (giriya) of a lion (sinha) whose likeness was once sculpted halfway up the monolith. Only the gigantic paws remain today. Within a grotto on Sigiria’s sheer west face, beautiful bare-breasted maidens still smile from incredible fresco paintings.
Surrounding the foot of the rock, extending for several hundred meters, are Asia’s oldest surviving landscape gardens, incorporating lovely ponds around Sigiriya’s plinth of fallen boulders.
The Parricide King
The site of Sigiriya was known from ancient times. Inscriptions of boulder confirm that it was hermitage for Buddhist monks from an early date. Its importance as a sear of royalty began and ended in the last quarter of the 5th Century, under the direction of a mad genius name Kasyapa – who conceived and perfected this masterpiece under a shadow of paranoiac fear.
Kasyapa –was the eldest son of Anuradhapura’s King Dhatusena, the great tank builder. Fearing that he would be supplanted in the royal succession by his younger half-brother Mogallan- whose mother was of royal blood while Kasyapa seized the throne and imprisoned his father. Mogallan fled to India.
Kasyapa demanded that his father reveal the wealth he convinced had been hidden. Dhatusena too the young Kasyapa to the bund of the Kalawewa, the greatest of his irrigation works. Dhatusena pointed out to the tank and said that was his treasure “Slay my father1’”creid an outraged Kasyapa. The formerking was walled alive with his tomb. Fear, arrogance and a delusion of divinity drove Kasyapa to construct his palace on Sigirya rock. Seven years after his ascent to the throne in 477 A.D. Kasyapa moved into his fabulous new palace. Eleven years after, in 495, he descended from his impregnable strong hold to meet Mogallan – returned from India with an army of combined Chola and Sinhalese troops.
Sigiriya Graffiti
Although Mogallan immediately moved his capital back to Anuradhapura, Sigiriya was not instantly forgotten. For at least 500 years after the death of Kasyapa, sightseers scaled the citadel to gawk at the Sigiriya maidens and admire the view. Sri Lanka’s oldest graffiti verifies this. Incised in tine pearl – like script into the so-called Mirror Wall, beneath the frescoes pocked, are prose and poems more than 1,000 years old.
The Mirror Wall held the astonishing walkway called the Gallery against the rock face. Visitors pass this route immediately after they have climbed the caged spiral staircase to the phenomenal frescoes pocket of the Sigiriya Maidens. No one quite knows whom the seductive beauties, painted in tempera in brilliant colours on the rock wall.
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