Wat Preah Enkosa

I spent another couple of hours exploring a new wat last Saturday morning and I have to admit I came away slightly disappointed as I had read that it had some old Angkor remains, as well as the modern temple … but, no! And it wasn’t just that I didn’t find them, as I asked the two different monks I talked to and they both said there were no old temples to be found there.

I tuktuked along to the wat as it looked from the map to be quite a long way along River Road, though, in the end, it wasn’t as far as I thought, and it was a pleasant stroll back afterwards.

When I arrived, monks and men were preparing the pagoda for the following day’s Khmer New Year celebrations, placing flags in the pole stands on either side of the long tree-shaded driveway. One of the monks said hello and ‘where are you from?’, the universal greeting here, and our conversation continued as he gave me a tour of the temple building, unlocking it for me to see the two huge Buddhas inside, one seated and one reclining – as well as assorted smaller ones.

The monk’s name was Somurt and he is almost 23. He has been a monk for 8 years. He told me the temple is 99 years old and the interior paintings (of the ubiquitous scenes from Buddha’s life) are between 30 and 35 years old. This information may or may not be true but, certainly, the temple ceiling was showing much water damage, whereas the paintings still looked quite fresh and vibrant.

Somurt’s English was quite good but he wanted to practise so we sat a while and chatted. Eventually, he went back to his flags and I wandered a little further, though didn’t get far before I was waylaid by another young monk, Sopheap, who invited me to sit with him on a bench amongst the burial stupas. Our conversation was almost an exact repeat of the previous one but I was happy to sit and help a little with his pronunciation. Bizarrely, he had been listening to an Australian sports commentary on his phone radio. I’m not sure how helpful that was to his English learning and he admitted he couldn’t understand most of it – ‘too fast and a funny accent’ – his words, not mine.

I wandered some more, taking photos of stupas and temple buildings, a beautiful open-sided building full of golden seated Buddhas and, finally, what looked like an office building – or, perhaps, with offices downstairs and monk accommodation upstairs, as the building was mostly unfinished.

In front of its main entrance was an elaborately carved archway, under which sat another group of Buddhas and a set of glass boxes for donations for building restoration or monk education or feeding the monks or just general blessings. An elderly nun sat to one side, giving out blessings, so I tossed a buck in her basket and knelt to receive her good wishes for the New Year. She then agreed to be photographed, moving over to sit elegantly in front of the Buddhas, arranging her clothing to look her best. I showed her the photos I took and I gather from what she said next (in Khmer) that she wanted a copy of the pictures, so I’ll get some done and take back to her next week.

Postscript: I discovered, when I got back to my room, that I had gone to the wrong wat. My tuktuk driver had been going to drive past the entrance and I stopped him, thinking he hadn’t understood where I wanted to go. My mistake! There are, in fact, two wats quite close together and, turns out, their names are also quite similar: Enkosa and Enkosei. When I checked Google maps again, I discovered the first was hidden under cloudy skies – at least, that’s my excuse!

Kesararam: the wat and the killing field

Earlier this week, in preparation for writing this blog, I googled Wat Kesararam, a wat in central Siem Reap, immediately adjacent to the five-star Angkor Sokha Hotel on Route 6. Little do the guests enjoying that hotel’s luxurious surrounds realise what sits next to their sumptuous accommodation. Much to my surprise and with not a little horror, I discovered that the wat had been the site of a security office, a prison and a killing field during the disastrous days of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a fact not much advertised in this town.

A news story from the Phnom Penh Post, dated as recently as 12 September 2012, described the finding of a mass grave during excavations for a new building within the wat grounds. The disarticulated remains of at least 18 bodies were unearthed and now rest in a small wooden hut, amidst the burial stupas of deceased monks. It is rather a gruesome sight but, sadly, a very real part of the all too recent history of this country.

The news article related a conversation with the wat’s head monk, Sambath Ly Yeut, during which he described previous macabre finds in the wat grounds: ‘In the last five or six years we have been discovering human bones. In 2001, when we built our temple, we saw many bones of bodies, buried with handcuffs.’ The most recent bones also showed signs of having suffered violent deaths, with arm bones trussed with ropes and leg bones fastened together by iron manacles. Indeed, the skull I looked at had a large hole above the left eye socket and a smaller one in the right temple area, which may have occurred during the excavation process but may also have been bullet holes, or worse. There were, apparently, 24 known killing sites in the Siem Reap area alone, with the number of victims at these sites estimated at 44,528!

I find such violence difficult to contemplate and it seems appropriate to me that Wat Kesararam is now a place for meditation and prayer. Many sources date the wat’s construction to the early 1970s but this seems unlikely given the site’s violent history: in the early 70s, the Khmer Rouge were slowly gaining control of Cambodia and their genocidal regime was in full swing. Ly Yeut named 2001 as the year of the temple’s construction, though the wat may have been founded prior to that.

The temple’s excellent state of preservation supports this more recent construction date, and both its exterior and its interior walls are decorated with immense and very colourful depictions of the events from the life of Buddha. Lions and nagas (representations of seven-headed serpents) guard the stairways at the four entrances to the building, with the nagas’ bodies forming the balustrades that border the temple platform and fantastical bird-headed creatures (garudas?) supporting these balustrades.

Wat Keseraram is also known as the “Pagoda of the Cornflower Petals”, perhaps from the shapes of the gold-painted moulding that adorns the roof edges of the temple. The anthropomorphic ornamental roof supports, the windows, doors and their frames also glisten with gold paint, as do many of the burial stupas near the boundaries of the wat.

Most impressive is the tall shrine that sits in the large courtyard in front of the temple. It’s the largest I’ve seen here in Siem Reap and is wonderfully embellished with intricate sculptural reliefs. And encircling the whole of this wat, and the dark secrets sheltered within, is a garishly painted boundary wall, making its location very easy to find. Perhaps all this wat’s bright colour serves as the monks’ way of banishing the grim truth of its not so distant past.