A WIZARD OF WOOD

Just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel is the wood carving workshop run by Mahinda Jayalath, who has been carving wood for 30 years. His workshop is arrestingly modest – a mere covered shelter off a tiny back road where he and his 3 workers sit making their carvings. His work sits within a most ancient and celebrated Kandyan tradition for it was here, in the Kandyan kingdom that the island produced one of its greatest and most forgotten artists - Delmada Devendra Mulachari, the Grinling Gibbons, of Sri Lanka.

Mulachari is renowned nearby Embekke Devale, a magical medieval masterpiece, in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts. In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in of itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breast feeding children, double headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world class carvings. But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a women; a bird takes on human attributes, a slight of hand revels that an elephant is a bull; another, that is a lion. Today the demand for wood carvings is more for doors and windows, lattice work to position above doors; and statues of Lord Buddha, plus the odd elephant or cobra for the tourist market. All this, and more is what Mahinda Jayalath and his tiny team put out. Should you be around for more than 2 or three days, he is more than likely to have the right amount of time to make any sort of special commission.