KINGDOM OF KOTTE

Kotte Kingdom was the capital of our island from 1415-1565 AD predominated by the long reign of Parakrama Bahu VI, the last Sinhala king who ruled a unified Lanka. The attacks on the Kotte Kingdom both by external aggressors as the Portuguese and internal dissidents were so ferocious that only meagre visible remnants testify to the existence of a once magnificent city. Just past the junction of Rajagiriya or Welikada (the more authentic name) along the Battaramulla road, one comes to the bridge under which flows a rivulet of the famous Diyawanna Oya (river) that snaked around the city. It was in the proximity of this bridge that the resplendent gateway to the old city had stood. It had been a stone-hewn gigantic entrance and no trace of it now remains. The city had been circumscribed by a mighty rampart and moat built by Nissanka Alagakkonara, a minister. Very few traces of this moat and rampart are now visible here and there as seen in the boundaries of the Perakumba Pirivena. According to existing ruins it is concluded that the rampart had been 8 feet high and 30 feet wide. The Dalada Perahara is said to have paraded along the rampart replete with elephants and flambeau-carrying dancers not to mention the king himself riding behind the richly caparisoned elephant carrying the sacred relic casket followed by thousands of devotees.

 

There is a road in modern Kotte city named Rampart Road , the only tribute to this mighty rampart built to ward off attacks. Along parts of the moat, encroachers have put up shacks and coconut trees flourish here and there. That is the sad fate of a very historical structure put up as late as the 15th century. Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte is the least preserved of our ancient capitals. Even our first capital of Anuradhapura going back to pre-Christian times exhibits a better state of preservation and the explanation given usually for this state of affairs is that Kotte s proximity to the capital spelt its final doom. As the population began to burst within Colombo s seams, the deep moat began to provide a refuge to the homeless and also a dumping ground of garbage while the more resourceful citizens very unpatriotically built their concrete dwellings over the remnants of the ancient buildings. The lethargy of those in power added to the tragic situation. Anyway this modern house building came as an aftermath of the pillage of the city of Kotte by the Portuguese and by King Rajasinghe I of Sitawaka. Rajasinghe attacked the city to drive away the Portuguese while the Portuguese themselves destroyed it before moving onto the fort of Colombo with King Dharmapala. All in all the resplendent capital of Kotte plummeted into the most chaotic melee.

The Royal Palace eulogized in the Sandeshas (message poetry of Kotte) as the most magnificent edifice, a five-storied building constructed out of luminous blue stone, in whose exotic courts kings of old received embassies, had been transformed into a heap of rubble and the Dutch are said to have carried away the bricks and other materials to build their churches in Colombo. Later the rubble and the bricks had been carried away during the British government to build the breakwater at Galle Face. Contractors assigned with the removal of these had carried away the more worthy artifacts as the moonstones to decorate their own homes. That is how a moonstone (sandakada pahana) of the Royal Palace adorns a house at Veyangoda now. The cruel fate that befell the Royal Palace, befell the Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Tooth Relic) said to be a three-storied edifice crowned by a chaitya with a golden pinnacle.

Today a Maligawa Road (Palace Road) runs along in Kotte by an area surmised to be where the Palace was. The Royal Pond of the Palace had been intact till about the 30s according to some sources but somebody now has built a house above it too. The Portuguese had destroyed the Dalada Maligawa and built a church in the precincts and the church too has now disappeared leaving behind only the karakoppuwa or the cemetery. The Alakeswara Road leads to the ruins of the Palace where Minister Alagakkonara who built the Kotte fortress lived and within its proximity are two large Tombs (according to some, chaityas) known as the the Baddegana Tombs. They had been buried inside a mini-mountain for years and years, foliage having grown above it

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