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Angkor - 2003
Angkor - 2003
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-25 13:29:32
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Angkor: majestic splendour
Just as it impossible to describe the feeling of polar cold at 60 degrees below zero until one has experienced it, it is impossible to fully understand the surreal atmosphere hovering over Cambodia’s temples, immersed in a jungle. Not all the synomyms of grandiose, spectacular, majestic and mastodontic will suffice to define it. (Jacek Palkiewicz, Phnom Penh, January 1998)
The reality of this place is so charged with magic that it beggars the imagination, while its grandeur is breathtaking. For centuries covered and protected in the warm bosom of the Cambodian jungle, the grandiose vestiges of this city of temples exude mystery. Everything is sacred and cyclopean, from the vegetation to the constructions. And the glorious silence hovering over the monuments is of an eloquence that defies description.
An extraordinary world of stone is being attacked by the mastodontic roots of the kapok tree, while the ficus gibbosa trees are engaged in mortal combat with the walls, slipping into the cracks for a grain of earth.
Angkor, the ancient and fabulously rich Cambodian capital, the centre of the Khmer civilization which, from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, became the hub of the greatest empire in southeast Asia, incorporates numerous royal cities with an infinity of magnificent monasteries, temples, bridges, embankments, ponds, military fortresses, and dizzily high mausoleum-shrines built at the top of spacious terraces. The monuments are scattered throughout the jungle north of lake Tonie Sap not far from Siem Reap, over an area as large as the island of Elba. But after the Siamese occupation in 1431 all this languished and finally declined.
In the first half of our century expert French restorers carried out a great many operations for the conservation of this heritage. Unfortunately, the tragic events that overtook Cambodia, the insurrection against the
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See photographs from:
Cambodia Gallery
