Banteay Srei โ€” temple
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay

Banteay Srei

  • 2 min read
  • 13.599ยฐ N 103.963ยฐ E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Its exact consecration date, 22 April 967, is known from a foundation stela found only in 1936; scholars had assumed the rich carving meant a later date.
  • Its founder Yajnavaraha was a grandson of King Harshavarman I and the teacher of the future King Jayavarman V.
  • The temple's founding inscription praises Yajnavaraha as a scholar who helped people suffering from illness, injustice and poverty.
  • The temple once stood at the heart of a town called Ishvarapura, whose outer gate is all that survives of a wall about 500 metres square.
  • Banteay Srei is the first Khmer temple where pediments show complete narrative scenes from myth rather than single figures.
  • One of its pediments, showing the demon brothers Sunda and Upasunda fighting over the nymph Tilottama, is now in the Guimet Museum in Paris.
  • A pediment depicts Karaikkal Ammaiyar, one of the few women among the 63 Tamil saints devoted to Shiva.
  • Another pediment shows the burning of the Khandava Forest, with Krishna and Arjuna firing arrows to hold back Indra's rain.
  • An inscription of 1119 records the temple's rededication to Shiva, and the last known inscription, from 1303, shows it was still in use.
  • The kneeling animal-headed guardians on the sanctuary stairways are mostly replicas; many originals were stolen or moved to museums.

Why it is worth it

Banteay Srei is a small temple with an outsized reputation. Set in the countryside about 25 kilometres northeast of the main Angkor group, it was consecrated in 967, and unlike almost every other major monument of Angkor it was not built by a king but by two courtiers in the service of Rajendravarman II, Yajnavaraha and Vishnukumara. Its original name, Tribhuvanamaheshvara, means "Great Lord of the Threefold World", a title of Shiva, to whom the main sanctuary is dedicated; the buildings north of the axis honour Vishnu. The popular name, usually translated as "citadel of women" or "citadel of beauty", is a later one and probably refers to the delicacy of the carving.

That delicacy is the whole point of a visit. The temple is built of a fine-grained pink and red sandstone that can be worked almost like wood, and its builders covered nearly every surface with ornament: scrolling foliage, garlands, guardian figures and miniature towers that repeat the shapes of the real ones. Everything is on a reduced scale; the central tower stands under ten metres, and visitors have to stoop through the doorways of the inner sanctuaries. The triangular pediments are the masterpieces, carved in deep relief with scenes from Hindu myth and the epics. One of the most admired shows the demon king Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa while Shiva, seated at the top, calmly presses the mountain down with his toe and the creatures on its slopes scatter in alarm.

Look also for the devatas, the female divinities standing in niches on the corners of the central towers, with their high headdresses, jewellery and slight half-smiles. They have a dramatic modern history. The site was only brought to French attention in 1914, and in 1923 the young Andrรฉ Malraux, later a celebrated novelist and minister of culture, was arrested for cutting four of these figures out of the walls to sell; the statues were recovered. In the 1930s Banteay Srei became the first temple at Angkor to be rebuilt by anastylosis, the method of dismantling a ruin and reassembling it stone by stone with its original blocks carried out under the French conservator Henri Marchal. A Cambodian-Swiss project around 2000 added drainage to protect the soft stone. Early morning and late afternoon light, when the sandstone glows a deeper red, show the carving at its best.

Getting there

The temple lies about 28 kilometres from Siem Reap, the town that serves as the gateway to Angkor and is usually reached by tuk-tuk or hired car. The nearest airport is Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport (SAI), about 38 kilometres away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Siem Reap 6The Most Beautiful Places in Cambodia 9The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Cambodia 6The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Cambodia 7The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Cambodia 7The Most Beautiful Medieval Temples 7The Most Remarkable Medieval Archaeological Sites 18The Greatest Medieval Archaeological Wonders 20The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Temples 35The Most Beautiful Temples 95The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Most Beautiful Medieval Sacred Places 123The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places 179The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Most Beautiful Medieval Places 204The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Banteay Srei is a 10th century CE Cambodian temple dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Parvati. Located in the area of Angkor, it lies near the hill of Phnom Dei, 25ย km (16ย mi) north-east of the main group of temples that once belonged to the medieval capitals of Yaล›odharapura and Angkor Thom. Banteay Srei is built largely of red sandstone, a medium that lends itself to the elaborate decorative wall carvings which are still observable today. The buildings themselves are miniature in scale, unusually so when measured by the standards of Angkorian construction. These factors have made the temple extremely popular with tourists, and have led to its being widely praised as the jewel of Khmer art.

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