the wonder of ancient asia​

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Palace, fortress, art gallery, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders. Its moment of destruction - around 500 CE – brought to an end one of the longest parties the world had yet enjoyed.

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Much of it is hard to identify today, but, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it: water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel. Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. Naturalistic gardens wove around massive boulders. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens.

Across it all stretched double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematical precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion. The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above, though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Singhalese for “Lion’s Rock.” It is as if the walls of heaven itself defend it.

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Close by are the great cave temples of Dambulla, a Buddhist Sistine Chapel with 153 statues and over 2,000 square meters of breathtaking murals​