Rebel attack unveils historic art

The temple is Sri Lanka's holiest Buddhist shrine

By Frances Harrison in Kandy

Sri Lankan scholars say a Tamil Tiger bomb at the country's most holy Buddhist temple uncovered priceless murals which change the story of Sri Lankan art.

Never, never, never did we expect this to happen

Professor L Prematilleke

Restoration work at the Temple of the Tooth, in the hill station of Kandy, is now complete, after a bomb exploded in 1998 in what is now being heralded as a miracle.

The Temple of the Tooth is the final resting place of the Buddha's tooth, which was first brought to Ceylon in the fourth century AD.

Sri Lankans believe say the tooth relic is the most sacred object of worship in the Buddhist world and it is never revealed to the public.

Bomb attack

Twice a day, the doors to the inner vestibule of the tooth shrine are ceremoniously unlocked to the sound of drums, conch shells and trumpets.

The faithful who have made it through the body searches and metal detectors, shuffle past the inner chamber.

The final resting place of Buddha's tooth

Three years ago a bomb exploded at dawn right outside the main entrance to the temple.

"The roof was completely blown off and the shrine was open to the sky and all the plaster came off," said Buddhist monk Muridenya Dharmaratana who was lucky to survive the attack.

Restoration work is now almost complete.

It was only as conservationists sifted through the rubble that they made an unexpected discovery.

The explosion blew one layer of plaster off the inside wall of the tooth shrine but left the wall still standing even though it was only made of wattle and daub.

Hidden art

Beneath the bright 1940s wall paintings, two earlier layers of plaster were detected from the late and early 18th century.

An 18C mural of an elephant was revealed

Images of an elephant and a dancer's leg were revealed which art historians believe is part of a wider fresco of a ceremonial pageant painted during the reign of King Narendrasimha who built the shrine.

"We are very happy in a way," says Professor Leelananda Prematilleke, who was involved in the restoration work.

"The paintings tell us a story about the continuity of painting during the Kandyan period and also about what we call the dark period - between the C12th and C15th," he says.

The professor who has just written a book called Recent Discoveries - Ancient Murals argues the murals help show the ancient painting tradition continued beyond the middle ages.

He and his team have collected all the fragments in a new museum along with pictures of the destruction wreaked by the bomb.

"Never, never, never did we expect this to happen," says Professor Prematilleke.

But he admits the bomb did bring "a blessing in disguise".