Prasat Chrung
Coordinates: 13 ° 27 ′ 16.5 ″ N , 103 ° 50 ′ 40.2 ″ E
The Prasat Chrung ("corner towers"), four small Buddhist temples , stand in the four corners of the city wall of Angkor Thom , Cambodia . They were built in the early 13th century under King Jayavarman VII .
description
Around 1200 Jayavarman VII had Angkor Thom built, the new capital of his Angkor empire . The Khmer builders framed the square city complex, oriented towards the cardinal points, with a wall; they provided the inside of this approximately 8 m high city wall with generous, almost equally high earth fillings. The Prasat Chrung , four resembling Prasat (temple towers) with mandapa (vestibules) were soon built on this earthfill in the four corners of the city wall .
The interiors of the temple towers were about 4 by 4 m. Cross-shaped floor plans were created through the vestibules. The entrances opened to the east, in the case of the eastern temple towers also to the west; Looking in from the inside, niches pointed to the other main points of the compass; The sandstone buildings stood on about 35 by 30 m large areas, each bordered on two sides by the city wall, on two sides by additional enclosing walls made of laterite blocks . The gopura (gate structures) were located on the east and west sides of these additional walls.
King Jayavarman VIII (around 1243–1295) had the Prasat Chrung Hindu and thereby partially chiseled around and partially destroyed the Buddhist ornaments. Today only the walls of the towers of the south-west and north-west temples remain , while the north-east and south-east temples each have enclosing walls with a gate, relatively well-preserved architectural decorations and a stele building east of the temple tower . The facilities can be reached from the city gates of Angkor Thom via the earthworks that have been built up; some paths are comfortable (so from the south gate to the southeast temple), others are hardly passable (so from the north gate to the northeast temple).
literature
- Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques: Ancient Angkor . River Books, Bangkok 1999, ISBN 974-8225-27-5 .
- Nick Ray: Cambodia ("Cambodia", 2005). Mair Dumont 2010, p. 185, ISBN 978-3-8297-2209-4 (Lonely Planet).
- Johann Reinhart Zieger: Angkor and the Khmer temples in Cambodia . Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai 2006, ISBN 974-9575-60-1 .
