The temples at Angkor Wat
Number one on my personal must-see list for my trip to Southeast Asia was the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Once the splendid center of the capital of the Khmer Empire (Angkor was the name of the city; ‘Wat’ means temple), today attracting millions of visitors per year – to this day, Angkor Wat is the largest religious building in the world.
If every country has its historical epoch of glory, for Cambodia this is very clearly the Khmer Empire. The national museum splits up Cambodian history in three parts: pre-Angkor, Angkor (9th to 15th century), and post-Angkor. The temple of Angkor Wat is pictured on Cambodia’s national flag. Our western ignorance about the empire does not do it justice: it was larger than the Byzantine Empire, which existed simultaneously, and Angkor was at the time the largest city in the world.
In a bizarre (and still mysterious) turn of events in the 15th century, the empire vanished almost overnight. The city of Angkor was abandoned and in the following centuries it slowly disappeared back into the jungle. Its wooden buildings perished, but the temples built from stone persisted. They were ‘re-discovered’ in the 1840s by a French explorer who described it as “grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome”.
Angkor Wat is in fact only one of many temples on a vast archeological complex of over 400 km2. The distances between different sites are large and the best way to visit is to hire a tuktuk for a day that takes you from temple to temple. I’ve done several tours over different days to the main ten sites, but the whole area has as many as 72 major temples, not to mention the remains of still hundreds of others that were found.
Angkor Wat may be the largest temple but, in my opinion, not even the most impressive one! All temples are built in different styles, one even more grandiose than the other, and we can only imagine how grandiose the temples must have looked like when they weren’t in ruins but the proud center of a city, covered in gold, painted in bright colors, and brimming with life.
But without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring is seeing how in the past five centuries, after humans left the place, nature has come back. Trees started growing on top of the temples and their roots meander around the stones reaching all the way to the ground, creating an absolutely stunning confluence of architecture and nature. You might know the sights from the Lara Croft Tomb Raider movie, where the temple called Ta Prohm is used as a backdrop for Lara’s adventures.
The temple of Angkor Wat is considered one of the best places to see the sunrise. My first attempt was very anticlimactic: it was too cloudy to see anything of the sun (picture #1). But I gave it a second chance, on a special day: March 21st was the day of the equinox, a bi-annual event when the sun is right above the equator. The temple is so designed that on that day the sun rises right above the middle tower. I was one of 10,000 to get up at 5 a.m. and witness this special event – and this time, the sun did not disappoint (see last pictures).
The temples and with it the nearby city of Siem Reap attract a wild mix of people from all over the world: checkbox tourists, spiritual seekers, history buffs, Angelina Jolie fans, backpackers, Buddhist monks. But with thousands of them gathered at Angkor Wat to witness the sunrise, a Cambodian newspaper described the scene as such: “The atmosphere brimmed with a sense of unity, as individuals of various backgrounds shared the common goal of memorialising the unique experience.”
Click here to read the newspaper article about the March 2024 equinox.