Trincomalee | Finding Secret Gods And Ghosts

Who are the gods and ghosts that can still be heard whispering in this little-visited town on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard?

Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard.

Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure, the town, like the country, has more than its fair share of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed, is little different now from when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE.

From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka to the country’s founding father, a terrorising prince descended from lions, the island’s earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral spirits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort.

Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam, albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors.

And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible.

It is not what it seems, a small town of passing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears its reputation with utmost modesty, restrained like a crown of sapphires beneath a hoodie.

The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the passage of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town.

Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast.

Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged along the western seaboard, in the hill country, and in the far south.

The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside.

Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park - whilst a third, the A15, leads towards the coastal villages of the south.

None brings with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing.

A beautiful, sparse, and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding to almost green forests very occasionally. A most twenty-first-century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice, at Trincomalee itself.

And almost immediately, you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other.

Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park.

Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words

“Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.”

Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently burst like firecrackers over world fiction – from Sri Lanka itself of course, but also from Canada, Australia, the UK, the US or New Zealand, part of a raw diaspora created by civil war and corruption. 

Their fiction has become an unexpected global embassy, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, and bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.

Family was close to Charles Austen’s heart far beyond his famous sister, for he created a scandal back home with his serial marriage to two sisters. But this failed to detract from his lasting memory, and he is remembered by one of his subordinates as stoic and dutiful to the end.

“Our good admiral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.”

All around his grave are earlier and later graves, mostly of British colonists, military officers and engineers who staffed this most distant part of the empire. Out of tombs and obelisks, which enhance the weathered details of Georgian architecture, trees and shrubs grow. Buffalo graze amidst them. “Home at last, thy labours done, “reads the tomb of Charles Frank Miller, who died aged 235 in 1899, “safe and blessed the victory won…angels now have welcomed thee.”

It is rumoured that occasionally a few dedicated members of the Jane Austen society fly out to tend Charles Austen’s grave; but come more often they must, for within the next few decades the graveyard will be all but obliterated by weather and neglect, like the vanished church of St Stephen’s that once oversaw it all.

In the placid residential suburbs north of the graveyard lives another fast-disappearing record of the island’s colonial times – this one linked to the Portuguese, who first came to the island in 1505. For here, around the self-contained streets of Palayittu live the last descendants of the island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local women who still speak a remarkable patois - Portuguese Creole.

For over 350 years, this language flourished as one of the country’s primary lingua francas, a mixture of Singhala, Tamil, and Portuguese, peppered with loanwords from the Javan and Kaffir slaves and soldiers the Portuguese brought.

Although primarily a spoken language, it has a slight, brittle written record now held by the British Library in a series of documents called the Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole Manuscript.

They were collated by Hugh Nevill, the scholar civil servant in colonial Ceylon between 1865 and 1897 and include pieces so wonderfully entitled “The Portuguese Song of Batticaloa,” “The Songs of the Portuguese Kaffir”,; and “The Story of Orson and Valentine”.

Today, its speakers barely number a thousand. Yet go into any one of these houses in Palayittu, and you will hear it, history spoken as if every day, even if its perishable date is held in the voices of an ageing and disappearing community, its register vanishing a little more with each passing day before your eyes and ears.

One small enterprise bucks the trend – for a young member of the community, Derrick Keil, has taken to singing songs in his family patois, retelling past fables with beautifully choreographed dramas that have become quite a hit on YouTube.

Of course, Trincomalee is best known as a port, with its harbour ranking as the fourth-largest natural harbour in the world and having been contested by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British. Even the Danes had a go at trying to occupy it, though nothing remains of their 2-month invasion.

Despite its deep-water attributes, the harbour has attracted little commercial attention since its use by the early Anuradhapuran and later Kandyan kings, when, as the port of Gokanna, it served as a main access to the island. Since then, its use has primarily been military – a deterrent to invaders, protected by a large fort, and later marked by a lighthouse offshore on Round Island and on the mainland at Foul Point.

Now an ever more diminishing columnar wreck, Foul Point Lighthouse overlooks the beaches of the coastal south, home to some of the very last villages of the Coastal Vedda. Its walls are still scarred from the many battles fought around it during the Sri Lankan civil war. This conflict engulfed the Tamil-dominated Eastern province during which time it was often in the hands of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The war was a catastrophe for all concerned, but the fighting severely challenged the Veddas’ already tested way of life.

These descendants of the original Mesolithic settlers who migrated from India in prehistoric times, some 40,000 years ago, are an ever more ghostly presence on the island, their bloodlines dissipated by intermarriage. However, genetic studies show that they are more closely related to several northern and western Indian tribes than to the Tamil and Sinhalese communities on the island today.

The Vedda worship a range of ancient folk deities, as well as mainstream Hindu gods such as Murugan. Ancestor worship and the cult of the dead mark out many of their still-living practices.

Scraping a precarious living by fishing and farming, they speak a variant of Tamil. Rarely translated, one song, sung by honeycomb cutters, asks:

“The bees from yonder hills of Palle Talawa and Kade suck nectar from the flowers and make the honeycomb. So why should you give them undue pain when there is no honey by cutting the honeycomb?” 

Close by is a link to the arrival in Sri Lanka of its greatest treasure: the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha. Here, guarding the entrance to the Ullackalie Lagoon, lies a temple, the Lankapatuna Samudragiri, all that is left of the once-great port of Lankapatuna, another primary marine gateway into the Anuradhapura Kingdom.

The relic - said to be Lord Buddha’s left upper canine tooth - arrived on the island around 371 CE, hidden in the hair ornamentation of an Indian princess, brought to the island to safeguard it from the warfare that threatened it in India.

Almost immediately, it became the island's most precious possession, legitimising the reign of kings and validating a priestly theocracy. As a relic, it has plenty of competition.

Scores of alternative artefacts assert a connection to the Lord Buddha, including bowls, hairs, and bones. But the tooth is considered the most important because it touched the words he uttered in prayer.

Across the world, thirty-two other places claim ownership of Buddha’s teeth. If all are credible, it would account for the teacher’s entire set of eight incisors, four canines, eight premolars, and twelve molars.

But somehow, by dint of custom, history, worship, faith, and record, this tooth eventually arrived at Anuradhapura, where the monks of the Abhayagiri fraternity took custody of it under the protection of the then king, Mahasena. A bare wide beach bordered by flat dry farmland and scrub forest surrounds the old temple that marks its arrival.

Destroyed by war and the tsunami, the temple’s vast ruins stretch across a 50-acre site, at one end of which stands a small, forgettable new temple. Even so, it is a singular place to sit and consider the island's unique marvels and the byzantine stories that explain its true nature.

A little inland from here are the ruins of another, even older temple, Seruwawila Mangala Raja Maha. Built in the 2nd century BC by the client kings of Rhuana, its importance lies in its reputation as a Solosmasthana – one of the sixteen or seventeen holiest Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka - whose significance stems from ancient chronicles stating that Lord Buddha once visited it.

The source for such visits rests primarily in the pages of the Mahavamsa, a chronicle created by a Buddhist monk in the 5th or 6th century CE. There is little else to corroborate such beliefs, but in Sri Lanka, faith goes all the way.

Seven of these sacred places exist in Anuradhapura itself – the revered Bodhi tree; the 2nd-century BCE Mirisaweti and Rathnamali stupas, this last a vast structure filled with holy relics; the still larger stupas of Abhayagiri and Jetavanaramaya; and the historic Sela Cetiya, which marks the spot where King Devanampiya Tissa met Mahinda, missionary son of the Indian emperor Ashoka, and was converted to Buddhism. 

Another hides in plain sight in the jungle of southeast Sri Lanka – the Kiri Vehera in Kataragama, with another, the Tissamaharama Raja Maha, once a major centre of Buddhist education from the earliest times, nearby.

Adam’s Peak and a cave in Divaguham mark two more, along with the Nagadeepa Purana near Jaffa, the stunning Kelaniya Raja Maha near Colombo, its gem-studded throne now vanished, and the ruined stupa of Deeghawapi.

All these once-great religious centres and shrines fell into absolute disrepair following the devastating invasion of the island in 993 by Rajarata, the Chola emperor in India. Still, since independence, they have been gradually brought back to notice.

The one nearest to Trincomalee, the Seruwawila Mangala Raja Maha, is said to enshrine a hair and part of the teacher’s forehead. Destroyed by a Tamil invasion in the 11th century, it was rediscovered in the 1920s, with its entrances, ponds, terraces, and dormitories rescued from the jungle.

Heading back into Trincomalee, you find the ruins of the buildings that marked out the town’s later colonial life – most especially Fort Frederick. This citadel began its colonial life rather eccentrically, being constructed from stones stolen from the ancient Hindu Koneswaram temple, the Temple of a Thousand Pillars, by the Danish in 1619.

Quite what these latter-day Vikings were really up to so far from home remains a treasured, if niche, debating point.

The Portuguese soon took it over and completed the destruction of the ancient temple, part of their campaign against Hinduism. The temple, which for over 1000 years had amassed an almost unbelievable treasury of gold, manuscripts, and gems, was looted bare in just a few hours, and its remaining stones were carried off to build the new fort. Amongst the many acts of colonial theft and vandalism, this one stands out as among the very worst.

But the Dutch had little respect for Portuguese fort-building skills. Having captured the territory back in 1639, they rebuilt the whole thing by 1665. Still, by 1795 it fell again – this time to the British, amongst whose early visitors was Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, then much preoccupied expelling the French from southern India. His bungalow remains – now the officer's mess of the 2nd battalion of the Gajaba Regiment of the Sri Lankan Army.

Little but the fort’s colossal bastion walls, its old entrance gates, a museum housed in a restored 18th-century building, and a scattering of other ruins remain. The entire site is strewn with the vast dressed stones of the ancient temple and is also home to yet another ancient graveyard, this one containing four antique Table Tombs, all that is left of a Dutch burial ground, now more favoured by monkeys than mourners.

But more positively, it is home again to the rebuilt Temple of a Thousand Pillars, and a fit address for a Pancha Ishwaram, one of the five abodes of Shiva located along the circumference of Sri Lanka.

Once again, a significant place of pilgrimage, this rebuilt temple stands as it once did on a promontory overlooking the sea, its entrance guarded by a vast statue of lord Shiva and its halls home again to a few of the ancient artefacts and statues recovered from the jungle and in the sea in recent times. Throughout the day, priests attend to the spiritual needs of an unending stream of worshippers.

Thirteen kilometres north of the temple and a few kilometres inland from the sea lies Trincomalee’s most significant and most overlooked jewel –

The Velgam Vehera. Like so much in and around Trincomalee, it had – for centuries – been utterly forgotten until, in 1929, as Wall Street crashed and the Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end, archaeologists chanced upon it. 

If buildings could ever be said to be whispers, this then is the most haunting whisper of the lot.  Beneath earth, trees, and jungle, stretching out to the shores of a great lake, the Velgam Vehera’s many scattered ruins were brought back to sight for the first time in centuries: brick stupas, stone inscriptions, balustrades, buildings, moon stones, and mura gals.

These mura gals – or guard stones – are especially moving, standing in silent upright pose, guardians of the flights of steps that had led a multitude of forgotten people out of the everyday and into the sacred temple itself.

The steps they protect have worn down to just a few flights; the moonstone they encompass is almost entirely rubbed away. The temple beyond is now just an outline of ancient bricks, and the guard stones themselves are plain, almost stumpy, but still doing their ageless job as sentinels of the site.

The temple was built by one of the island’s most fabulous kings, Devanampiya Thissa, between 307 and 267 BCE. It became one of the kingdom’s most important monasteries, a centre of learning, worship and care that ensured its continued nurture by many successive monarchs.

Extraordinarily, it even managed to survive the collapse of the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa kingdoms and the wholesale destruction brought to almost every other part of the island by the Chola emperor Rajaraja I's invasion.

Recently uncovered Tamil inscriptions found in the temple even record donations by the emperor. A later 11th-century Tamil inscription records the gift of 84 cows for maintaining the perpetual lamps.

And in a wonderful moment of serendipity, archaeologists were to find a bronze lamp over two feet in height whose inscription read: "the sacred perpetual lamp, donated by Eranadan Yakkan".

The site is vast, and though only modestly studied, it boasts a considerable number of notable buildings: steps and walls, verandas and platforms, buildings of long forgotten uses that stretch deep into the jungle, a long image house decorated with Dravidian mouldings, statues of Lord Buddha, and a large stupa whose bricks are decorated with terracotta figures.

It is a deeply spiritual place, one of the most otherworldly sites on the island, utterly tranquil and almost wholly forgotten by academics, government, worshippers, or tourists.

An hour’s drive north of here takes you to what is said to be the country’s very first stupa, the Girihandu Seya. Stupas are structures exclusive to Buddhist countries and are among the sights that make Sri Lanka so distinctively beautiful.

The shape is made for perfect skylines. Bells, bubbles, pots, lotuses – even heaps of paddy: Sri Lanka’s many thousands of stupas were built in a range of complementary shapes, and in such numbers that it is unlikely that a five-minute car journey anywhere in the country will fail to take you past one.

They are still being constructed to this day – in Kandy, Kalutara and Kotmale, to name just three. Whatever their shape or age, they are outstanding architectural creations, mesmerisingly graceful as they rise above their visiting pilgrims, providing them with a place to meditate and a home for the relics and religious objects they venerate.

Various ancient sources attest to this particular stupa’s origins: it was built when two merchants arrived with a casket containing a relic of the Lord Buddha's hair. The merchants - Tapassu and Bhalluka – had more than the usual sense of spiritual concerns that typically characterise most businessmen and women. 

Returning from lunch, they were unable to move their casket. That decided them. They built a small stone structure around it. They left, leaving to others the task of building out this still-beautiful structure with statutes, protective walls, and the pillars of once-overarching roofs – a vista of concentric circles, accessed by a flight of steps with guardstones and balustrades.

Still further north, the Kokkilai Lagoon stretches out, one of the least-known and most unvisited bird sanctuaries in the country. Swamps of mangrove and seagrass make up its richness, its shores bordering onto scrub and forest.

And here live, amongst the many sea birds, the cormorants, ducks, egrets, flamingos, herons, and ibis, two that speak most eloquently for Trincomalee: the pelican, the great ancient Egyptian symbol for death and the afterlife; and the stork, forever associated with the soul.

And birds are an appropriate place to bring this tour to an end – not here in the lagoon but further south in a small, serene hotel called Cbeyond Nilaveli. Designed for and with Laki Senanayake, one of the most significant Sri Lankan artists of the post-independence period and a friend of Geoffrey Bawa and his brother Bevis Bawa, Donald Friend, Barbara Sansoni and Ena de Silva, this getaway on the beach is filled with his paintings and statues of owls, sea birds, and sea horses.

For anyone troubled by a troubled world, it is a place of utter peace - and an opportunity to sit before the gentle waves and consider that history, even the most ancient of histories, in living on undetected, provides anyone with the right antenna to better cherish and enjoy the living world—even so subtle a world as Trincomalee.

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.