Prambanan is Indonesia's great Hindu temple and one of the masterpieces of Southeast Asian architecture. A forest of grey volcanic stone towers shooting up into the sky, the tallest almost 47 meters high, covered in exquisitely fine reliefs and crowned with tiered pinnacles. Built in the 9th century in the very heart of Java, it is the Hindu answer to neighboring Buddhist Borobudur, and seeing both on the same trip is a glimpse into an era when India's two great religions flourished side by side on this tropical island.
The central complex is dedicated to the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity: the three main temples honor Shiva (the largest and most ornate), Vishnu and Brahma, and facing them stand three more for their divine mounts. The temple walls are lined with bas-reliefs that tell the Ramayana, the great Indian epic, scene by scene. Around them, now in ruins or partly restored, stood hundreds of smaller temples: Prambanan was conceived as a cosmos in stone, the royal sanctuary of a powerful kingdom.
This guide helps you make the most of your visit: when to go to dodge the heat and the crowds, how to get there cheaply from Yogyakarta, which temples to see beyond the main complex (Sewu, Plaosan, Ratu Boko) and how to round off the day with the Ramayana Ballet, danced outdoors with the illuminated temples as a backdrop. Prambanan is best enjoyed with time, good light and a bit of context: behind every relief lie a thousand years of history.
Prambanan was built in the 9th century, around the year 850, in the heart of the Mataram kingdom of Central Java, probably under King Rakai Pikatan of the Sanjaya dynasty, who followed Shaivite Hinduism. It was conceived as the great state temple dedicated to the Trimurti —Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma—, an assertion of Hindu power in the face of the Buddhist splendor of nearby Borobudur, raised shortly before by the Sailendra dynasty. Barely a century later, around 930, the Mataram court moved to East Java for reasons still debated (an eruption of Mount Merapi? political pressure?) and Prambanan was abandoned and swallowed up by the jungle and by earthquakes. For centuries it lay in ruins, wrapped in the legend of Loro Jonggrang, the princess turned to stone. Rediscovered by Europeans in the 19th century and excavated and restored throughout the 20th century, it was declared a World Heritage Site in 1991. In 2006 a strong earthquake damaged it again, but it was repaired. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and cultural heart of Indonesia: home of Borobudur and the great Javanese empires, of the capital Jakarta and of a chain of volcanoes that defines the island.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Prambanan, you have to picture Central Java some twelve hundred years ago: a fertile plain watered by rivers flowing down from the volcanoes, with rice paddies, villages and royal courts that built up enormous power through rice, trade and religious prestige. In that Java, the two great religions that had come from India lived side by side and competed: Buddhism and Hinduism. And from that refined rivalry, fought more with ideas and art than with war, came some of the most extraordinary monuments in the world.
In the 8th century the plain was ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, followers of Mahayana Buddhism, the same dynasty that raised the colossal Borobudur, the largest Buddhist structure on the planet. At the same time, or shortly after, the Sanjaya dynasty was on the rise. It followed Shaivite Hinduism and reigned over the same kingdom of Mataram (not to be confused with the later sultanate of the same name). For a time the two dynasties were intertwined through marriages and alliances, and the landscape filled with temples of both faiths, sometimes just a few kilometres apart.
That meeting of faiths left astonishing traces of tolerance. Near Prambanan, the Buddhist temple of Plaosan was built, according to tradition, at the request of a Buddhist princess married to a Hindu king. And the Prambanan complex itself has the great Buddhist sanctuary of Sewu right next to it, inside the same park. Prambanan can't be understood on its own: it is the Hindu piece on a board where Buddhism and Hinduism flourished side by side, under the same volcanic sky.
Prambanan was built in the mid-9th century, around the year 850, under King Rakai Pikatan of the Sanjaya dynasty. Most scholars read it as a monumental statement of Hindu power: after the Buddhist splendour of Borobudur, the Shaivite court wanted its own great state temple, a sanctuary that could rival its Buddhist neighbours' in size and ambition. An inscription from the area, the Shivagrha inscription ('the house of Shiva'), dated 856, celebrates the consecration of a magnificent temple dedicated to Shiva and describes work to divert a river next to the compound, details that fit Prambanan.
The design is a Hindu cosmos translated into stone. In the central courtyard stand the three great temples of the Trimurti: Shiva's, the largest, almost 47 metres high, flanked by those of Brahma and Vishnu. Facing them are three smaller temples for the gods' mounts (the bull Nandi, the goose Hamsa and the eagle Garuda), and around them, in concentric rings, stood hundreds of secondary temples, the 'perwara', arranged to reproduce the order of the universe. The walls were covered with exquisitely fine reliefs showing scenes from the Ramayana and the Krishnayana.
The technique is remarkable: volcanic andesite stone, carved and assembled without mortar, each block fitted against the next, and decorated with plant motifs, celestial beings, musicians and wish-granting trees. Prambanan was not a temple for ordinary people but the ritual heart of the kingdom, the place where the monarchy connected with the divine. For a few decades it was the sacred centre of a powerful state in the heart of Java.
The splendour didn't last long. Around the year 930, just a few decades after it was built, the court of the kingdom of Mataram left Central Java and moved its capital to the east of the island. Historians still debate why: suggestions include a catastrophic eruption of Merapi, the volcano that towers over the plain, power struggles, or a shift of trade and agriculture towards other regions. Whatever the cause, Prambanan's ritual life left with the court. With no kings to maintain it, the great complex was neglected.
From then on, a long decline set in. The jungle gradually covered the temples, and above all the earthquakes, frequent in this volcanic land, brought down many of the towers, which collapsed into mountains of stone blocks. For centuries Prambanan was a field of ruins, a mystery of fallen stones among the undergrowth, known to the Javanese farmers who lived nearby but whose origins had faded from memory.
Out of that oblivion came one of Java's most famous legends, the tale of Loro Jonggrang ('the slender maiden'). It tells how Prince Bandung Bondowoso, after killing Princess Loro Jonggrang's father, asked for her hand in marriage. To turn him down without offending him, she set an impossible condition: build a thousand temples in a single night. When the prince, helped by spirits, was about to succeed, the princess had the village women light fires and pound rice to fake the dawn. Fooled, the spirits fled, leaving the work unfinished. Furious, the prince cursed the princess and turned her into the last statue, the one locals today identify with the image of Durga in the Shiva temple. The legend gave Prambanan its other popular name: the 'Loro Jonggrang temple'.
Modern interest in Prambanan began in the early 19th century, during the brief period of British rule over Java. In 1811, a surveyor working for Thomas Stamford Raffles, the same administrator who promoted the study of Borobudur, described the ruins and brought them to the attention of the Western world. For much of the 19th century, however, the site continued to be plundered: villagers took the stones and collectors carried off sculptures, while the complex remained a chaos of collapsed blocks.
The real recovery came in the 20th century. The first clearing and documentation work was done in the 1880s, but the large-scale restoration of the main Shiva temple was not completed until 1953, by which time Indonesia was independent. Rebuilding these temples was a gigantic task, almost a jigsaw puzzle of tens of thousands of stones. As a rule, a temple was only rebuilt if at least 75% of its original blocks survived, so many of the hundreds of smaller shrines are still fields of stones, waiting their turn.
International recognition came in 1991, when Unesco inscribed the 'Prambanan Temple Compounds' on the World Heritage List, together with the neighbouring Buddhist temples of Sewu, Lumbung and Bubrah. Prambanan thus went from forgotten ruin to national symbol and one of Indonesia's great attractions, a testament in stone to the brilliant Hindu-Buddhist Java of more than a thousand years ago.
Prambanan is still a living temple on unstable ground. On 27 May 2006, a powerful earthquake of around magnitude 6.3 shook the Yogyakarta region, leaving thousands dead in southern Java. The quake badly damaged the complex: stones came loose, structures cracked and several towers were at risk of collapse, so the site had to close temporarily and the main temples were shored up. Although the great Trimurti sanctuaries stayed standing, the damage called for new consolidation work that went on for years. That is why, even today, access to some of the inner chambers may be restricted or require a helmet.
That earthquake was a reminder that Prambanan lives in the shadow of volcanoes and on one of the most seismically active zones on the planet, the same one that a century earlier may have contributed to its abandonment. Conservation is now an ongoing task, combining archaeological restoration with managing a site that draws crowds.
Today Prambanan is at once a historic monument, a tourist attraction and a religious space: Indonesia's Hindu community, a minority but a lively one, holds ceremonies there such as Galungan and major rituals, and every week the Ramayana ballet brings back to the temples, in the form of dance, the same epic their walls have told in stone for a thousand years. Together with Borobudur, Prambanan is today the great testament to classical Java and one of the most recognisable images of Indonesia.
