After Yangon and Inle Lake, we finally reach Bagan.
Former capital of the Pagan Empire for 250 years, founded in the century. II AD, the city of 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries covers 104 km2 of plain. Myanmar’s Ankgor Wat is perhaps the most touristy area in this country.
Without planning, we arrived exactly during the Ananda Festival. Every year, people from villages come by their oxen carriages and set up their camps around the temple.
It is one of the largest festivals in Bagan and Myanmar, being celebrated by all social categories in nearby towns and villages. Symbolizing the endless wisdom of the Buddha, the purpose of the festival is to raise money for the temple, helping the monks to maintain it in the best possible condition. Officially, the festival lasts a month, but theoretically it lasts for a week where the full moon day ends the festival. The period also coincides with the end of the harvest so that people, most of them from neighboring villages, can celebrate in peace.
Out of respect for the temple and the believers, I took very few pictures inside.
It also seemed like a social gathering, where locals or even monks meet once a year, exchange opinions and children make new friends.
They set up their tents near or next to the smaller temples around the great Ananda temple. Some camps are not really preserving this Unesco Site.
All around the temple you see street vendors with traditional food, clothes, entertainment programs, juices, cigarettes and many many other things. We like to get lost among the stalls and feel the atmosphere, it’s like a market with everything.
During the day there is a real agitation, carriages, tuk-tuks (3-wheeled motorcycle with the back transformed into a 2-seater cabin), electric motorcycles, bicycles, animals.
Buddhist monks have no personal belongings, they live exclusively from the donations of the believers. Every morning, after sunrise, they go out through the village to shops and houses. Everyone gives what they have, and if they don’t, nobody gets upset. A spoonful of rice, money, fruit, anything is welcome. Usually young aspirants are sent to the streets to collect donations. I also noticed nuns, they have distinctive pink clothes.
1000 Buddhist monks recite scriptures continuously for 72 hours. On the last day of the festival, the full moon, the people of the neighboring villages donate money and many other things to the monks, at the same time thanking for the harvest.
The monks form a huge queue of hundreds of meters in the morning and patiently wait their turn for gifts.
The remaining donations are given to the poor, I noticed that on the basis of a ticket they went to the monks who shared the gifts and took a basket. I thought it was very nice of them, the monks did not ask to receive more than each can take, which allowed the poor to take something too.
We arrived in the morning and stayed until after noon. They still shared the donations, I think it lasted until the evening. We knew that the people from the neighboring villages would go home, we hurried to catch them on the way. It’s a show itself this departure, the carts with oxen loaded with goods bought from the festival as well as with the necessary things for a week at the campsite.
The next post will be about the sunsets and sunrises for which Bagan became so famous.
The photo equipment I used: Canon 6d body with Canon 85mm f 1.8 for portraits, Canon 17 40mm f 4 L, very useful for capturing busy markets and for landscapes and the Canon 70 200mm f 4 L for portraits and landscapes.
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