Tales of the Unconnected

Behind The Galleries:

Blog Archive Posts #11 down to #9:

Sigiriya, Sri Lanka: The Pleasure Palace at Lion's Rock; Chicago: How they turned the river round; St. Chad: A Tale of Two Churches.

29 January 2021

#11 Sigiriya, Sri Lanka: The Pleasure Palace at Lion's Rock

Bursting through lush, jungle terrain, Sigiriya is a massive column of granitic rock towering 660 feet above the surrounding area in Central Province, Sri Lanka. It is a monumental remnant of primeval times, when the landscape around Sigiriya was seething with active volcanoes.

Sigiriya was formed two billion years ago. The gigantic rock itself is a volcanic plug, the solidified rock mass within the former feeding pipe of a volcano. Magma hardened inside this vent, essentially stopping it up, like glue drying in the nozzle of a tube. This can sometimes cause a cataclysmic explosion, as pressure from liquid magma below builds up and is finally released, with devastating results.

In this case, however, volcano activity eventually ceased. Natural erosion by wind and rain slowly eroded the outer surface of the volcano (see diagram) exposing its solidified magma core. The exposed volcanic plug visible today is only the tip of a solidified lava shaft which extends deep into the earth’s surface.

The rock remained desolate, magnificent and uninhabited until the 5th Century, save for a few monastic settlements around the base.

In 473 CE (473 AD), King Dhatusena was the king of Sri Lanka and had been on the throne for 18 years. Dhatusena had two sons, Kashyapa I and Moggallana I. Moggallana was the son of the royal consort and the rightful heir to the throne, while Kashyapa was born to a non-royal concubine. Dhatusena’s daughter was married to his sister’s son Migara, the general of the king's army.

Following an argument between his daughter and sister, Dhatusena ordered his sister to be killed. In retribution, Migara encouraged and assisted Kashyapa to overthrow the king and take the throne. Kashyapa eventually rebelled against Dhatusena and overthrew him. Dhatusena was imprisoned and Kashyapa became the king of the country in 473.

Migara led Kashyapa to believe that Dhatusena had hidden treasures of great wealth and persuaded him to find them. Dhatusena agreed to reveal his riches to his son and led Kashyapa to the Kalavewa Reservoir he had built during his reign and, taking water into his hands, claimed that this was the only treasure he had. Enraged by this, Kashyapa had his father murdered by entombing him alive in the wall of his prison cell.

Following this brutal assassination, Kashyapa earned the name Pithru Ghathaka Kashyapa, meaning 'Kashyapa the Patricide' and became a pariah amongst his citizens and in the eyes of the Buddhist clergy.Unable to bear this and fearing of reprisal from his brother Moggallana, Kashyapa moved his capital and residence from the traditional capital of Anuradhapura to the more secure location of Sigiriya rock.

And it was here that he began to construct his hedonistic Sky Palace.

Kashpaya chose Sigiriya as his capital because of the strategic advantage it would give him in the event of an attack from his brother.

Large ramparts and moats were built around the city. A large, elaborate garden was built around the rock.

The gardens featured a wealth of pools and fountains, supplied with water by a complex underground irrigation system.

One third of the way up the near-perpendicular face of Sigiriya, Kashpaya ordered a Mirror Wall to be built, running a distance of two hundred meters alongside a gallery once covered with frescoes. Only half of this wall remains, but this has remained intact for over fifteen hundred years.

It is believed that its mirror-like sheen, once gleaming white, was achieved by using a special plaster made of fine lime, egg whites, and honey. The surface of the wall was then buffed to a brilliant lustre with beeswax.

Ancient graffiti on the Mirror Wall refer to as many as five hundred frescoes once covering the western surface of Sigiriya Rock.

Many believe they are depictions of the queens and concubines of Kashyapa's harem and thus Sigiriya is often referred to as Kashpaya's Pleasure Palace.

Overlooking a small plateau further up the rock, the king had a colossal statue of a lion carved into the rock to form a gateway to the palace at the summit.

This gave rise to the name Sigiriya, derived from the Sanskrit Sīnhāgiri: the Lion Rock (an etymology similar to Sinhapura, the Sanskrit name of Singapore, the Lion City).

The lion's head and body collapsed many centuries ago, but its paws still remain, to give a sense of the overwhelming scale of this once-proud structure.

A precarious staircase (not for those with a fear of heights) leads nowadays to Sigiriya's summit, where the crowning glory of Kashpaya's innermost sanctum was accessible only to a select few: the king, the queen and a small retinue of staff, including the king's concubines. Painted brilliant white, the Sky Palace appeared to float above the treetops as though on a gleaming white cloud.

It is where, according to ancient chronicles, he lived like the god Kuvera in Alakamanda, the mythical city of the gods.

This is an artist's impression of what the summit of Sigiriya might have looked like in Kashpaya's time, with its Upper and Lower Palace areas, luxuriant gardens, rock-cut reservoirs and pools filled with carefully harvested rainwater run-off and its marble walkways.

And a huge throne, hewn from the rock...whose incumbent would, eventually, be overthrown.

In about the eighteenth year of his exile, while languishing in India, Moggallana received news that Migara the chief of Kasyapa's army, was willing to defect to his side and support him in a bid to claim the throne.

Moggallana assembled a ragbag army of his own and returned to Sri Lanka, setting up camp a fair distance away from Sigiriya. On hearing of this, Kasyapa resolved to confront his brother. In the ensuring battle Migara defected to Moggallana, together with the king's army.

Abandoned and alone, Kasyapa unsheathed his dagger, placed its cold blade against his neck, drew it across swiftly and slit his throat.

Moggallana, still respectful of his fallen older brother, granted him a royal cremation. The stupa at Pidurangala is believed to mark the spot where Kasyapa was cremated.

After defeating his brother, Moggallana became king and returned the capital to Anuradhapura, converting Sigiriya into a Buddhist monastery complex, which survived until the 14th century.

Sigiriya today is a UNESCO listed World Heritage Site. Before the pandemic, it was visited by 1 million people a year.

Its only permanent residents now are the Toque Macaque monkeys, who amiably share the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' with visitors from around the globe. One day soon, we hope, those visitors will start to return.

I'd love to hear your comments about my latest post...clicking on the Lion's Rock here will take you to the right place! Thank you 😊

9 December 2020

#10 Chicago: How they turned the river round

By the midpoint of the 19th century, Chicago had become known as ‘The Typhoid City’. Cholera and dysentery were rife. Chicago's citizens had become used to dumping their rubbish into the river, which was also a convenient repository for raw sewage, industrial chemicals and assorted animal body parts from the stockyards.

In some places the effluent had coagulated to such a depth that islands of excrement had risen up in the middle of the river.

In these photographs, a man and a chicken are taking precarious refuge.

All this refuse flowed straight into Lake Michigan.

And Lake Michigan was the source of the city’s drinking water.

Chicago's population climbed steadily in the 19th century, from just 4,470 in 1840 to 112,172 by 1860.

Little wonder, then, that waterborne diseases became endemic.

An outbreak of cholera in 1849 killed 678 persons, 2.9 percent of the city's population, and an 1854 outbreak killed 1,424 people.

In response, the public held meetings and demanded that the City Council rid the city of its filth.

The legislature of Illinois created the Board of Sewerage Commissioners on February 14, 1855, leading to the appointment of assistant health officers to aid the cleanup, and by August the Council had resolved to build a sewage system.

Enter one Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, whom the Board of Sewerage Commissioners appointed chief engineer following his successful work on Boston’s water distribution system.

He set about designing a sewer system for Chicago, breathtaking in its scope and ambition, in a bid to transform the ailing health of the city.

To make space for the sewers, Chesbrough had the city raised up by as much as 10 feet, using an elaborate system of jacks.

It was an extraordinary feat of engineering, made possible by a gigantic labour force and Chesbrough's unflinching belief in the impossible.

Despite these Herculean efforts however, sewage still flowed into Lake Michigan.

Chesbrough's next audacious scheme was to build a tunnel 60 feet below the bottom of the lake to a ‘water intake crib’ two miles out into the lake, to draw the city’s drinking water in from offshore.

It took three years to complete the tunnel.

But all it took was for heavy rains to cause the river and its muck to empty out into the lake beyond the point of its intake crib and so continue to contaminate the water supply.

It was time for Chesbrough's most outrageous solution of all.

He would attempt to reverse the flow of the Chicago River.

To which most Chicagoans said, “You’re gonna do WHAT??!!”

(Photo: Water Intake Crib today.)

Just west of Chicago, there is a 'sub-continental divide'. Any rain falling to the east of this point falls towards Lake Michigan.

Chesbrough proposed digging a deep channel west from the Chicago River, then the river - and all its sewage - would start flowing west towards the Mississippi.

The basic principle was simply to use gravity.

At first they tried to deepen an existing canal, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, but this didn’t work.

So they decided to dig a bigger, deeper ditch, which they did actually call ‘The Big Ditch’.

This 'ditch' became the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

When completed the canal would drain into the Des Plaines river which flowed into the Mississippi, taking Chicago’s muck and filth down south towards St Louis and into the Gulf of Mexico.

The start of works was delayed by the American Civil War and Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, so the work didn’t actually commence until 1892, six years after Chesbrough’s death.

Thousands of labourers started digging, aided by steam shovels and dynamite.

Tim Samuelson, Chicago's official cultural historian said of the momentous project, “This was men, machinery, creativity, and pure chutzpah,”

In the end they excavated 42 million cubic yards. (This would fill up the Willis Tower 20 times.)

The canal is 28-mile-long. It took 8 years to build.

It cost over $6,500,000 to build - equivalent to just under $208,000,000 today.

Chicago maintained that the waters of Lake Michigan would dilute and therefore purify the stinking waters of the Chicago River.

Downstream, St Louis wasn’t persuaded by this argument and set to work preparing a lawsuit.

The canal builders doubled their efforts in the light of this impending legal action and on the morning of Jan 2 1900, the frozen clay of the last dam holding back the Chicago River was breached.

St Louis finally filed their lawsuit and the case made it to the US Supreme Court. Chicago not only prevailed but was congratulated.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the Mississippi was, indeed, foul – but the putrid waters couldn’t be blamed entirely on Chicago, since several other cities much closer to St. Louis were also discharging their waste into the river.

Meanwhile, wrote Holmes, municipalities closer to Chicago were actually benefiting from the infusion of the fresh lake water into their rivers.

It took a couple of weeks for the Chicago River’s waters to reach the Mississippi.

Chicago had cured its drinking water crisis and accomplished what is still considered to be one of the greatest engineering feats in the history of the world.

Postscript:

In recent times, the canal has become home for aggressive Asian carp, which are swimming northwards and threatening to invade Lake Michigan, much to the consternation of local anglers.

Some are saying it is time to re-reverse the flow of the Chicago River….😳😳😳

Visit the new CHICAGO Gallery for my modern day portraits of this vibrant city.

9 November 2020

#9 St. Chad: A Tale of Two Churches

Looming out of the fog, the dome of St Chad’s gazes out as a lone sentinel watching over the medieval town of Shrewsbury. This venerable church rises proud and peerless above the River Severn, the Quarry Park, the thriving market and its neighbouring streets and Shrewsbury School.

But who was St Chad, in whose honour the people of the town built not one, but two churches?

Chad was a peripatetic monk, educated on the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 7th century. He was the adopted child and student of the Irish monk Aidan, who had been invited by Oswald, king of Northumbria, to establish a Celtic monastery there.

Chad lived on the island of Lindisfarne until the age of twenty, studying to become a novice monk. At that age, after the death of Aidan, he sailed to Ireland, where he travelled widely in pursuit of spiritual knowledge, following an ascetic path, with fellow monk Egbert as his companion. He returned to Northumbria in the year of 664.

In Chad's times, a constant and bloody conflict was being fought between the kingdoms of Mercia, (often supported by Welsh princes such as Cadwallon) and Northumbria.

King Oswald, the patron of Chad's adoptive father Aidan and king of Northumbria for eight years, was killed by the pagan Mercian ruler Penda at the Battle of Maserfield in 641. Oswald's body was dismembered and his head and limbs and skewered on stakes. However, legend has it that an eagle (some say a raven) flew off with his severed arm and dropped it into an ash tree. From this spot, it is said that a spring has bubbled ever since, reputedly bestowing healing powers. The name of the town of Oswestry in modern day Shropshire is believed to derive from the mystical episode of Oswald's Tree.

Before his horrific death, Oswald had done much to spread the Christian faith throughout Northumbria. This work was continued by his brother Oswiu, who finally killed his arch enemy Penda in 655 and brought the kingdom Mercia under his influence.

Oswiu was nobly supported in his quest to spread the Christian message by Chad, who became abbot of several monasteries, Bishop of the Northumbrians and subsequently Bishop of the Mercians and the Lindsey People. He was revered for his grace, humility, devotion and great warmth of spirit.

Chad died of the Justinian Plague on 2 March 672 and was already regarded as a saint due to a holiness which communicated itself across boundaries of culture and politics. He was buried at the Church of Saint Mary, which later became part of the cathedral at Lichfield.

Chad's life was not forgotten. A church (known colloquially as Old St Chad's) was built in his honour in the area of Shrewsbury now bordered by Belmont, Princess St and College Hill. It was recorded as a ‘collegiate church’, the private property of the bishop of Lichfield, in the Domesday Book of 1086.

By the 15th century, following reconstruction as a consequence of a disastrous fire in 1393 in the area of Wyle Cop, the cruciform church boasted transepts, a chancel, a nave, a lady chapel and a booming tower, crowned with enormous bells which rang out over the town.

Over the next three centuries however, the church fell into disrepair and, by 1788, alarmingly large cracks had begun to appear in the tower. The church wardens asked the County Surveyor at that time, Thomas Telford, to inspect the damage.

Telford wrote his report, recommending that the tower be taken down and rebuilt, as it been constructed on such shallow foundations, further undermined by the digging of graves nearby. He also urged that the rotten timbers in the roof of the nave should be replaced without delay.

He presented this report to the church wardens, saying, "I think, Gentlemen, that if you have any other business to discuss, you would be wise to continue our meeting elsewhere, since this church may fall down on our heads at any moment."

The church wardens were appalled by the projected expenditure. They voted to ignore Telford's recommendations and employ a local stonemason instead, at a fraction of the cost. He was to cut away the cracked sections and underpin the pillar, but without removing, or even lessening, the vast weight of the tower and bells.

On the evening of 8 July 1788, two days after work had commenced, an attempt to ring the bells for a funeral caused the tower to shake so violently that the Sexton immediately evacuated the building. The following morning, as the clock struck four, the tower shuddered, splintered and collapsed, taking the roof and large sections of the church with it.

When the dust finally cleared, the whole area was strewn with confused heaps of stone, lead and timber, mingled with the shattered remains of pews, monuments, bells and fragments of the gilded pipes of the organ.

Telford, sadly, had been vindicated.

In time, the whole area was cleared. The only part of the church to survive was the Lady Chapel, which remains there to this day.

In this plan of 'Old St. Chad's', you can see the Lady Chapel, outlined here in bold, in the angle between the chancel (to its left) and the south transept.

A new church must be built, the town planners decided, on a new site overlooking the Quarry Park.

An architect called George Steuart was commissioned to design it and oversee its construction. He submitted four designs to the planning committee - three rectangular and one with a circular nave, a controversial choice for that period.

A rectangular design was favoured by the committee, but the exact siting for the church was keenly debated by the its members. Steuart offered to supply them with a plan to help them reach a decision but he cunningly sent them a scale plan of the round church he was keen to build, which could be fitted over the site plan, so that they adjust the church’s position as they wished.

The committee became so engrossed in deciding upon the exact spot for the new church (which ultimately involved the demolition of some ruins of the old town wall) that they failed to notice that the architect had switched the plan of the church for a circular building.

They returned the plans to Steuart, without any comments on the shape of the church and so he proceeded to draw up detailed plans. When the committee saw them, they protested, but Steuart told them that this was the design they had 'approved' and that redrawing them would incur considerable further expense.

As the church guide records, "Reluctant to venture into further expense, and, one imagines, exhausted by months of argument, the committee sullenly agreed to accept Steuart's design."

Once described as being in "execrable taste", the people of Shrewsbury have since taken the new St Chad’s Church to their hearts and it now gracefully defines the skyline of this beautiful medieval town.

A final postscript...

St Chad, in a very roundabout way, made it into the movies in 1984, when Shrewsbury was chosen for the location for ‘A Christmas Carol’, starring George C Scott. The filmmakers were seeking a cinematic resting place for Ebenezer Scrooge and uncovered an almost blank tombstone in the churchyard of St Chad’s, which they inscribed with the name of the famous Dickens character.

If you are lucky enough to find the churchyard unlocked, you can visit it and also give thanks for the life of St Chad, so revered that a church was built in his honour…twice!

I'd love to hear your thoughts about my latest blog post and the new Shrewsbury Gallery.

If you drop me a comment on the Contact page (click on the pic of me), I'll post it here straight away.

Thanks v much

Simon 😊 📷