Sigiriya

Chapter 38 of the Culavamsa ends with King Dhatusena at the Kalavapi, the reservoir he built. He bathes in it, drinks from it, and tells his son's men, "This here, my friends, is my whole wealth." In Wilhelm Geiger's 1929 translation, his son Kassapa answers with an order: "Slay my father." The general who carries it out strips the old king, chains him in a niche in a wall with his face outward, and closes it up with clay.

Kassapa then fails to kill his brother Moggallana and, the chronicle says, "betook himself through fear to Sihagiri, which is difficult of ascent for human beings." He walls the land around the rock, stores his treasure there, and builds "a staircase in the form of a lion," from which the rock takes its name. On top, he builds "a fine palace, worthy to behold, like another Alakamanda," the city of the god of wealth. In the 18th year, Moggallana returns from Jambudipa, India, with an army. In the battle, Kassapa turns his elephant to avoid a swamp, his troops take it for a retreat and break, and he cuts his own throat with his dagger, then raises the knife and sheathes it.

UNESCO inscribed the site in 1982. Its listing describes "the parricidal King Kassapa I," dates his reign 477 to 495, and places the ruins on a granite peak "some 180m high." The 1982 evaluation by ICOMOS, the body that advised UNESCO, gave the height as nearly 150 meters above the surrounding plateau.

The lion

In a footnote, Geiger described what was left of the lion in his day: the claws of its right paw, reaching "to the breast of a man standing upright," with a door between the paws and a steep iron ladder above them for the rest of the climb. UNESCO describes galleries and staircases "emerging from the mouth of a gigantic lion constructed of bricks and plaster." Only the paws remain. The Central Cultural Fund, the government body that runs the site, puts each one at about 3 meters long.

Palace or monastery

The chronicle itself places monks on the rock. After Kassapa's death, Moggallana gave two viharas "on the Sihagiri," named Dalha and Dathakondanna, to the Dhammaruci and Sagali schools. ICOMOS wrote that graffiti in the rock shelters of Buddhist monks show people living at Sigiriya since the 3rd century BC. It also wrote that Moggallana "returned the site of Sigiriya to the monks." ICOMOS gave Kassapa 11 years in residence. The chronicle and the Central Cultural Fund give him 18.

Raja de Silva, a scientist who became Archaeological Commissioner, published Sigiriya and its Significance in 2002. It argued that Sigiriya was never a palace, a fortress, or a capital. The book describes a Buddhist monastery that mixed Mahayana and Theravada practice, used for centuries before and after Kassapa. In reviewer Tissa Devendra's summary, no tiles, rafters, or post holes have been found on the summit. De Silva read the summit ruins as monks' cells roofed in thatch, and the lion as a reminder of the Buddha, "whose voice was like that of a roaring lion." He doubted the chronicle on one point. Its account of Kassapa was written centuries later by monks of the Mahavihara, and Kassapa, in de Silva's reading, followed the rival Abhayagiri. In his own later words, "the story of a palace on the summit of the Rock cannot be true." He accepted the wall, the lion staircase, and a monastery built by Kassapa.

Devendra wrote in 2002 that historians had never answered the thesis. Siri Gunasinghe of Peradeniya University kept Kassapa's palace in a 2008 study. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, in The Buddha in Sri Lanka (2019), called the monastery argument persuasive "on the face of it" and then rejected it, according to de Silva's 2020 reply to both. The archaeologist Senake Bandaranayake titled his 2013 book Sigiriya: City, Palace, Gardens, Monasteries, Paintings. The Central Cultural Fund now calls Sigiriya "simultaneously a fortress, palace, garden, gallery, and monastery."

The women on the rock

Halfway up the western face, in a shallow shelter, are the paintings of women. ICOMOS counted 21 in 1982 and called them "non-identified." The Central Cultural Fund counts 22 and says hundreds once covered the face. Its own summary of the debate: "Interpretations range from apsaras (celestial nymphs) to queens and consorts, or representations of goddesses."

Senarat Paranavitana, Archaeological Commissioner from 1940 to 1956, read them as cloud damsels and lightning princesses, from a medieval commentary on the chronicle. In his 1950 paper "Sigiri, the Abode of a God-king," the whole rock is a copy of the god Kuvera's palace on Mount Kailasa, with Kassapa as the god. De Silva identified every figure as Tara, the female bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, and cited a 1984 linguistic study by Wijesekera finding no cloud damsels or lightning princesses in Sinhala painting. Gunasinghe, by de Silva's account, saw no goddess at all, only beautiful women.

In 1967, by the Sunday Times's later account, a "politically motivated mob dabbed thick dark green commercial paint on the frescoes and used daggers to damage some of the murals." De Silva restored them with the Italian conservator Luciano Maranzi, who came back in 1978 after cyclonic winds. In 2010, white patches spread across the paintings.

The Mirror Wall

Below the paintings, a gallery runs along the rock behind a wall of polished plaster. From the 6th century on, visitors scratched verses into it, and the largest group of them is addressed to the painted women. One, in Paranavitana's translation, credits the place with "the bristling of hair which thrills the whole body." ICOMOS called the Sigiri graffiti among the oldest texts in the Sinhala language.

Paranavitana published 685 of them in 1956, in two volumes from Oxford University Press, as Sinhalese Verses of the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Centuries. In August 2010, Benille Priyanka published 800 more that nobody had read. Priyanka worked from the wall itself rather than from rubbings and gave a position on the wall for every reading so other scholars could check it. By his count, the wall holds about 1,800 records. Roughly 300 are too worn to read. His earliest date from the 6th or 7th century and his latest, a Sanskrit stanza, from the 14th or 15th. Five are in Tamil or unidentified scripts, and one is scratched into the paintings themselves.

The interlinear inscriptions

Paranavitana's late work is a separate dispute. In his last years, he published readings of what he called interlinear inscriptions, faint texts he said lay between the lines of known inscriptions, and used them to confirm his earlier theories. The historian K.M. de Silva wrote in 1981 that "no epigraphist other than Paranavitana has been able to see any such interlinear writing." Ananda Guruge reviewed three of the late books in 1996, The Story of Sigiri (1972) among them, and concluded that "every word presented as found on 'interlinear inscriptions' is written by none other than Paranavitana himself." In 2014, the scholar Vincent Tournier described them as forgeries. Raja de Silva defended his predecessor in 2005 and named two of Paranavitana's colleagues who had accepted that the interlinear writing exists. Paranavitana died in October 1972.

In 2026

On July 3, 2026, according to a Sinhala notice from the Central Cultural Fund, a later layer of protective plaster on the outer face of the Mirror Wall's north end cracked and began to come away, made worse by strong winds. The Department of Archaeology and the fund started emergency conservation.

On October 8, 2026, the Central Cultural Fund listed foreign adult tickets at US$35, or LKR 11,760 at that day's rate, and half tickets for children aged 6 to 12 at US$20. Prices are quoted in dollars and paid in rupees at a rate the fund updates daily. Children under 6 enter free with proof of age. Citizens of SAARC countries pay half and need a passport to get the reduced ticket. The fund's pages disagree on the Sigiriya Museum, which is open 8am to 5pm: one says the main ticket includes it, and the price table lists it separately at US$6.

Ticket counters are open 7am to 5pm daily. A ticket is good for a single entry on the day it is issued. Tickets can be ordered through the fund's e-ticket site up to 90 days ahead and collected at the counter with the receipt number, and payments are not refunded.

The fund puts the climb at about 1,200 steps and 1.5 to 2 hours. The route runs through the water gardens, whose fountains still work in the rainy season, then up to the paintings, along the Mirror Wall, and through the lion's paws to the summit. Photographing the paintings has been banned since December 30, 2015, because of flash damage, and travel guides in 2026 report the rule still enforced. Filming and drones need written permission from the fund in advance.

Wasps nest on the rock. On August 14, 2024, the fund closed the site for the afternoon after 70 visitors were stung, and its ticket terms ask visitors to follow staff instructions about wasps.