Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
carvings
”, perhaps even more spectacular than those on the outside, with further
elaborately bejewelled gods and goddesses arranged in tiers above multi-headed nagas.
The walkway was previously filled with rubble and covered over - the theory is that the
original terrace (whose outer wall this was) had begun to collapse and so a new
retaining wall was built around it.
Prasat Suor Prat
Rising on the opposite side of the road from the Terrace of the Elephants are twelve
distinctive laterite-and-sandstone towers, each with doors on two sides and windows on
three. hey're now known as the
Prasat Suor Prat
, “Towers of the Tightrope Walkers”,
although their original purpose isn't known - and it certainly wasn't for supporting a
tightrope. According to Zhou Daguan they were places for resolving disputes: the
parties concerned were kept shut up in one of the towers for between one and four
days, at the end of which (it was said) unless the heavens passed judgement, after which
the guilty person would inevitably be struck down by some illness or a
iction, while
the innocent party would emerge as healthy as at the moment they went in.
3
The Kleangs
Behind Prasat Suor Prat are the
Kleangs
, comprising two enormous warehouse-like
buildings with 1.5m-thick walls, open at both ends - although exactly whatever they
were built for remains unclear. The North Kleang is the older of the two and was
erected towards the end of the tenth century, possibly by Jayavarman V or
Jayaviravarman. The unfinished South Kleang is thought to have been constructed by
Suryavarman I to balance the view from the royal palace.
Baphuon
Only recently reopened after fifty years of intermittent restoration (see box below), the
eleventh-century
Baphuon
, the state temple of Udayadityavarman II, is one of the most
brutally imposing of all Angkor's temples - a veritable mountain of stone, austere and
faintly forbidding.
The principal approach is (as usual) from the east, along an impressive, 172m-long
sandstone
causeway
raised on three sets of stone posts and with a ruined pavilion
halfway (perhaps the base of what was originally a gopura), decorated with entertaining
human and animal carvings.
BAFFLING BAPHUON
Angkor's longest-running conservation saga, the
fifty-year restoration
of the
Baphuon
temple is a dramatic illustration of the pitfalls and perils of field archeology in action. Work on
the temple began in 1959 under the supervision of French architects, who decided that the
only way to save Baphuon from collapse was to dismantle the vast structure piece by piece
and then put it all back together again - a technique known as “anastylosis”. The temple was
therefore dismantled in preparation for its reconstruction, only for war to break out, after which
work was abandoned in 1971.
All might have been well, even so, had the Khmer Rouge not decided, in a moment of
whimsical iconoclasm, to destroy every last archeological record relating to work on the
temple, including plans showing how the hundreds of thousands of stones that had been
taken apart were intended to fit back together again. Meaning that when restoration work
finally restarted in 1995 conservators were faced (as Pascal Royere, who oversaw the project,
put it) with “a three-dimensional, 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture”.
Progress, not surprisingly, was slow, and it wasn't until 2011 that restorations were finally
concluded (at a total cost of $14m) and the temple restored to something approaching its
former glory. Numerous unindentified stones can still be seen laid out around the complex,
even so - unplaced pieces in a great archeological jigsaw that will never entirely be solved.
