The Temple of The Great Relic

Wat Mahathat - Ayutthaya Kingdom 

 Ayutthaya Kingdom was a Siamese kingdom that was founded in 1351. Ayutthaya Kingdom was the second Thai empire after Sukhothai Kingdom. At the height of its glory, Ayutthaya was one of the world’s largest and wealthiest cities under the reign of King Ramathibodi I, also known as U-Thong.

In 1360, King Ramathibodi declared Theravada Buddhism the official religion of Ayutthaya in an effort to unify his kingdom. Not only built Buddhist temples, the king also brought members of a sangha, a Buddhist monastic community, from Ceylon to establish new religious orders and spread the faith among the kingdom.
The temple of the Great Relic or better known by the local people as Wat Mahathat was one of the most important temples in the Ayutthaya Kingdom. It enshrined Buddha relics and was the seat of the Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism. In addition, The King performed important ceremonies here because Wat Mahathat was a Royal monastery and it was located close to the King’s palace.

When the Burmese invaded and largely destroyed Ayutthaya in 1767, the Wat Mahathat was set on fire the central prang of the
temple collapsed and has not been restored since then.
 From its destruction in 1767 . The invaders also vandalised many of the Buddha images and The Buddha heads in Ayutthaya. Over time, Wat Mahathat was not maintained and has been slightly damaged because of several looting and illegal excavation. The temple remained abandoned until its restoration by the Department of Fine Art of Thailand in the early 1950s.

Inside of Wat Mahathat, there is a Buddha head entwined within the roots of a tree. No one knows how exactly was the Buddha head entwined in the roots. Among many theories, there are theory  states when the temple was abandoned, there is a looter moved  the Buddha head away from the main temple in Ayutthaya to hide it. However, the looter could not move the head beyond the walls that surrounding the temple. Therefore, the stone Buddha head was left inside the wall where it got nestled in the tree roots and entwined within the growing roots until today.