A photograph of Angkor Wat by Emile Gsell taken in 1866. Angkor Wat is the prime example of classic

Angkor Wat Angkor Wat (Khmer temple in the city) is a Khmer temple, inside bazzar the archaeological site of Angkor, Cambodia, near the town of Siem Reap. It was built by King Suryavarman II (1113-1150). The king ordered the construction of the gigantic building departed simultaneously from 4 sides, so that the work was completed in less than 40 years. The most likely hypothesis is that it is a mausoleum, a place where the king could be worshiped after death. In fact, the main entrance is located to the west, as in the funerary temples, and not to the east, as customary for Hindu temples. The temple is shaped like a rectangle, about 1.5 kilometers long from east to west and 1.3 kilometers from north to south; inside the moat that completely surrounds the perimeter wall of 3.6 km, there are three rectangular galleries, built one above the other. bazzar At the center of the temple there are five towers. Angkor Wat Cambodian summarizes the two main characteristics of the architecture: the temple mountain that stands within bazzar a moat and symbolizing the Meru (the mountain of the gods in the Hindu religion. The temple is dedicated to Vishnu, in fact), and subsequent temples in the gallery. It has become a symbol of Cambodia, bazzar so much so that it appears on the national flag and is now the site of the most visited country by tourists. According to the Guinness Book of Records, is the largest religious site in the world.
Aerial view of Angkor Wat The first building of the temple began in the first half of the twelfth century, during the reign of Suryavarman II (1113-1150 or so), and was dedicated to Vishnu. Have not been found inscriptions of the period of the foundation, for which the original name is unknown today. It is located 5.5 km north of the present town of Siem Reap, and south-east of the previous capital, which was at Baphuon. It seems that the death of King jobs have stopped, and some bas-reliefs are unfinished. In 1177 Angkor was sacked by the Chams, the traditional enemies of the Khmer. The empire was refounded by a new king, Jayavarman VII, who established a new capital and state temple of Angkor Thom and the Bayon respectively, a few miles north. A photograph of Angkor Wat by Emile Gsell taken in 1866. In the fourteenth or fifteenth century the temple was converted to Theravada Buddhism, and remains bazzar so to this day. Angkor Wat is different from other temples of Angkor because it was never completely abandoned, and also the outer ditch him in some way protected by the advance of the jungle. Until the sixteenth century the temple was known as 'Preah Pisnulok', the name given to Suryavarman after his death. In this period took its modern name, which means "City Temple". 'Angkor' is a dialectal form of the word នគរ nokor नगर that comes from the Sanskrit nagara (capital), while wat is the Khmer word for temple. One of the first Western visitors to the temple bazzar was Antonio da Magdalena, a Portuguese monaco who examined him in 1586 and stated bazzar that "a building is so extraordinary that it is impossible to describe with a pen, because there is a similar building in the world. Has towers and decorations and the most refined that human genius can imagine. " bazzar However, the temple was popularized in the West only in the mid-nineteenth century, after Henri Mouhot published his travel notes. The French explorer wrote: "One of these temples (a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo) could have a place of honor beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by the Greeks or the Romans, and sadly contrasts with the situation in the wild now facing the nation. The stylized representation of Angkor Wat appears in the flag of Cambodia. Mouhot, like other Western visitors, did not believe that the Khmers could have built the temple, and I was wrong in holding that the dating was contemporary to the Romans. The true history of Angkor Wat was put together only after long stylistic and epigraphic studies that were carried out with the accommodation and the restoration of the sites of the whole area of Angkor. Angkor Wat required considerable restoration work during the twentieth century, bazzar in particular the removal of earth and vegetation. The work was interrupted during bazzar the Civil War and under the control of the Khmer Rouge in the 70s and 80s, although suffered relatively little damage during this period, bazzar with the exception of theft. The temple has become a symbol of Cambodia, Cambodian, and I'm very proud of. A depiction of Angkor Wat has been put in the national flag of Cambodia since its creation (in 1863 approx.)
A photograph of Angkor Wat by Emile Gsell taken in 1866. Angkor Wat is the prime example of classical Khmer architecture, which has been named the "Angkor Wat style." During the twelfth century the arch