PHNOM KULEN
Sacred site on a mountain adorned with temples and a reclining Buddha. The legendary Jayavarman II founded the Khmer empire here in the century.
In 2013, a team of French-Australian archaeologists unearthed an entire 1,200-year-old city buried in the jungle of Phnom Kulen, some 40km northwest of Angkor. Thanks to a recent laser-based technology known as "lidar", archaeologists now have a complete picture of what the city of Mahendraparvata was like: the 36 temple remains scattered all over Phnom Kulen and already catalogued were in fact linked by a network of roads, dykes, basins and canals, in a perfectly organized square layout! Founded in 802 by Jayarvarman II, some 80 years before the construction of the Rolûos temples (Angkor's oldest buildings) and some 350 years before Angkor Wat, Mahendraparvata
is at the origin of Khmer identity. These discoveries could lead to the Phnom Kulen site being listed as a Unesco World Heritage site for protection.
Situated some 50 km from Siem Reap, this mountain, adorned with temples and a huge reclining Buddha, is Cambodia's most sacred site: it was here in the 9thcentury that the legendary Jayavarman II founded the Khmer empire. For a long time, this ancient royal capital, difficult to access, was protected by the interminable war that bloodied the country. It was only in 1998 that the army moved in, after the fall of the last Khmer Rouge. Since then, the area has been cleared of mines and a road built by a Malaysian logging company.
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