January 1, 2005

A witness to a civilisation that dominated the whole of South East Asia prior to disappearing in the 15th century, this magical city has a strange power of fascination over those who have ever approached it. Once populated by hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, this Atlantis of the jungle, forgotten by its own country down through the centuries, and then rediscovered accidentally during the last century, has today become the centre point of a daily animation, the richness of which bears witness to the stong link that the Cambodians have always had with Angkor. We need only imagine what the Khmers of another time were, those who, blending Indian cosmologies with their own imagination, managed to revive old Indian myths, and translated them into sumpuous compositions on the scale of a temple, a city. Still bearing the scar of the terrible nightmare that fell on this country, the Khmer people are now rediscovering this wonderful symbol of their history. So the temples of Angkor Wat, Bayon, and Ta Prohm, where curls of incense now float in the air, have once again become a place of life for the Cambodians. These divine places, where time sometimes seems to have stopped, strangely saved from the destructive madness of the Khmer Rouge epic, are now the centre of walks, parties, worship and are visited once again by important people and other pilgrims, coming with offerings of flowers and fruits of the faithful.