Note sull'episodio
In 477 CE Kashyapa, son of King Dhatusena of Sri Lanka by a non-royal consort, seized the throne from the rightful heir, his half-brother Moggallana. With the help of Migara, the king's nephew and commander of the army, he staged a coup and had his father walled up alive. Moggallana fled to South India, vowing to return. Fearing revenge, Kashyapa abandoned the flat, exposed capital of Anuradhapura and, between 477 and 495 CE, built a new royal city on Sigiriya, the Lion Rock, a granite volcanic plug in the Central Province rising nearly 180 meters above the plains. Visitors climbed through a Lion Gate, walking between giant paws into the mouth of a brick and plaster lion, and the base was ringed by water gardens, boulder gardens, and terraced gardens.
On the western face, frescoes of up to 500 women covered a section about 140 meters long, and a polished mirror wall later carried more than 1,500 poems scratched by visitors from the 8th to 10th centuries. In 495 CE Moggallana returned with an army. Kashyapa rode out to fight on the plain, and when his war elephant turned to avoid swampy ground, his troops thought he was retreating and fled. Alone, he cut his own throat. Moggallana returned the capital to Anuradhapura and gave the rock to Buddhist monks, and British officer Jonathan Forbes came upon it in 1831.
- The gravity-fed water gardens, where narrowing terracotta pipes still push water through limestone fountains in the rainy season
- Boulders left propped on small stones so defenders could roll them onto attackers below
- A woman's envious poem about a deer-eyed maiden in pearls, and a visitor named Buddha who wrote that he would not write a poem
- The 1967 green paint attack on the frescoes and their rescue by Italian restorer Luciano Maranzi
- Doubts about the monk-written Culavamsa, alternative theories of a monastery or pleasure palace, and Arthur C. Clarke's Yakagala in The Fountains of Paradise