Prambanan

Prambanan is a ninth-century Hindu temple compound on the plain north-east of Yogyakarta in central Java, straddling the border between the Special Region of Yogyakarta and Central Java province. Built for the kings of Mataram and dedicated to the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, it is Indonesia's largest Hindu temple site and, after Angkor Wat, the second largest in South-East Asia. Its central Shiva temple, 47 metres high, rises over a complex that once held 240 shrines.

Construction probably began under the Mataram ruler Rakai Pikatan, whose name was found painted in red on a stone finial of the Shiva temple, and was carried on by his successor Lokapala. An inscription of 856 issued by Lokapala, known as the Shivagrha inscription, describes a Shiva temple compound that closely matches Prambanan and records its inauguration on 12 November of that year. Its original name was Shivagrha, the House of Shiva. The same text records that a nearby river, identified with the Opak, was diverted during the work, probably to protect the site from volcanic mudflows off Mount Merapi and to free space for building.

Why it was built is partly a matter of interpretation. Historians who accept a theory of two rival dynasties see it as a Hindu Sanjaya response to the great Buddhist monuments of the Sailendra house nearby, such as Borobudur and Sewu. At the very least it reflects a move by the Mataram court away from patronising Mahayana Buddhism and towards the worship of Shiva. Later kings, including Balitung, Daksa and Tulodong, expanded the complex, adding hundreds of smaller shrines. Some archaeologists think the great Shiva image in the central chamber was modelled on Balitung as a deified king. Prambanan served as the kingdom's royal temple, and scholars believe hundreds of Brahmins and their pupils once lived within its outer wall.

After some eighty years of use and enlargement, the temples were abandoned in the tenth century. In the 930s Mpu Sindok moved the Javanese court to East Java; the reason is unclear, and suggested causes include a devastating eruption of Merapi, which tradition dates to 1006, or a power struggle. The neglected shrines collapsed in a major earthquake in the sixteenth century. Local villagers still knew the ruins but no longer knew who had built them, and they explained the temples through the legend of Rara Jonggrang, a princess said to have been turned to stone, with the shrines raised overnight by demons serving the hero Bandung Bondowoso. The statue of Durga in the Shiva temple is still popularly called Rara Jonggrang.

The first European report came in 1733 from Cornelis Antonie Lons, an employee of the Dutch East India Company, who described "Brahmin temples" like a mountain of stones. When the Mataram Sultanate was divided in 1755, the ruins and the Opak River served as markers for the frontier between the Yogyakarta and Surakarta sultanates, a line that survives as today's provincial border. In 1805 the Dutch official Nicolaus Engelhard had the site cleared and drawn, and in 1811, during the brief British occupation of Java, Colin Mackenzie surveyed it for Thomas Stamford Raffles. For decades afterwards Dutch residents took sculptures away to decorate their gardens, villagers took stones for building, and poorly controlled digs in the 1880s encouraged looting.

The government of the Dutch East Indies began reconstruction in 1918, with proper restoration from 1930 using anastylosis, the reassembly of original blocks. Work stopped during the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Indonesian independence struggle, resuming in 1949. President Sukarno inaugurated the Shiva temple on its completion in 1953; the Brahma and Vishnu temples followed between 1978 and 1991, and the main group was finished in 1993. Shrines are rebuilt only when at least three-quarters of their original stone survives, and as of 2023 only six of the 224 subsidiary shrines had been fully restored.

UNESCO inscribed Prambanan as a World Heritage Site in 1991, and in the early 1990s Indonesia turned its surroundings into an archaeological park. The 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake damaged the temples, and ash from the Kelud eruption closed them briefly in 2014. Hindu communities have revived major ceremonies at the site, and in 2019 a purification rite was held there for the first time since its founding.