Anuradhapura

The city of Anuradhapura is situated one hundred and twenty eight miles (205 km) north of Colombo in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on the banks of the Malwatu Oya.The largest and oldest of all Sri Lanka’s ancient cities,Anuradhapura, according to legend, was first settled by Anuradha, a follower of Prince Vijaya the founder of the Sinhala race. Later, it was made the Capital by King Pandukabhaya about 380 BCE.Possibly, it takes a bit more effort to imagine it as it was more than 2000 years ago, with palaces and huge dagobas standing up to nine storeys high, a main processional avenue 24km (16 miles) long, and the richly decorated, ostentatious mansions of Sinhalese nobles and wealthy foreign merchants.Founded by King Pandukhabaya in 437BC, by the mid-3rd century BC Anuradhapura’s fame had spread as far as the Roman-Hellenistic world of the Mediterranean and by the 1st century AD it had established trade and diplomatic links with China. The Jetavana treasures, unearthed over the past 20 years (some are now displayed in the partially completed Jetavanarama Museum, on site) show evidence of these links to east and west.Anuradhapura was the royal seat of more than 250 Buddhist and Hindu kings recorded in the royal genealogies, and the preeminent city on the island for some 1400 years.Anuradhapura’s proximity to southern India both enriched it and encouraged the kingdom’s conversion to Buddhism, but was also its eventual downfall, making it vulnerable to the invading Tamil forces of Rajaraja Chola, who sacked the city in the 11th century AD. The Sinhalese capital then moved to Polonnaruwa. Although attempts were made to preserve its monuments after the overthrow and expulsion of the Chola dynasty, it was never restored to its former glory.The Mawathu Oya River forms the boundary between the sacred ancient city and the modern town of Anuradhapura, east of the river. To the west are several large tanks, some of them the work of King Mahasena (AD276-303), whose passion for large-scale construction also endowed the city with the enormous Jetavanarama Dagoba.Anuradhapura has been classed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.Anuradhapura or ‘the kingdom of Anura’, is the earliest capital of Sri Lanka and was home to the royal court from 437 BC to 1017 AD. However it is not only a city, but one of the great centres of Buddhism in South Asia visited by thousands of pilgrims and tourists each year. The site consists of a central ten metre high mound covered in jungle, marking the old urban core, surrounded by over thirty square kilometres of Buddhist monasteries and huge reservoirs. Amongst the most spectacular of the Buddhist monuments are four great stupas, solid domes of earth and brick, built over a Buddhist relic, which reach heights of over eighty metres and dominate the landscape of paddy fields and coconut trees.

(Source:Ancient Cities of Sri Lanka: Introduction)