Anuradhapura

Tradition names the city after Anuradha, a minister of the legendary founder Vijaya, and dates its establishment as a capital to the fourth century BC; archaeology shows a substantial settlement here well before the historical record begins. Its decisive moment came in the third century BC, when the monk Mahinda, sent by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, met King Devanampiya Tissa on the hill of Mihintale and converted him. A cutting of the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya was brought by the nun Sanghamitta and planted in the royal park, where it still grows, and the city became the centre of Theravada Buddhism.

Over the following centuries it grew into one of the largest cities in Asia, supported by a system of reservoirs and canals of remarkable sophistication. Dutugemunu, who defeated the South Indian ruler Elara in the second century BC, raised the Ruwanwelisaya; later kings built the vast monasteries of the Mahavihara, Abhayagiri and Jetavana, whose brick stupa was among the tallest buildings on earth when it was completed. Monks from China and elsewhere came to study, and the city's tanks — Basawakkulama, Tissa Wewa, Nuwara Wewa — fed a dense farming population.

Repeated invasions from South India wore the kingdom down, and in 993 the Chola empire sacked Anuradhapura and moved the capital to Polonnaruwa. The old city was abandoned to the forest for the best part of nine centuries. British surveyors and antiquarians rediscovered its monuments in the nineteenth century, excavation and restoration followed, and in the twentieth century the modern town was deliberately moved eastwards so that the sacred area could be cleared. During the civil war the city, close to the front lines, suffered attacks including one at the Sri Maha Bodhi in 1985. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.

Anuradhapura is first of all a pilgrimage city, and its daily culture is shaped by that. Families arrive by bus and lorry dressed in white, carrying lotus flowers, oil for the lamps and bundles of food; they walk barefoot between the stupas, pour water at the Bodhi tree, and tie strips of cloth to its railings. Monks are everywhere, and the sound of chanting carries across the parkland in the early morning and evening. On poya days, and above all at Poson in June, the crowds are enormous and the city's roads are lined with dansal, stalls where volunteers hand out rice, drinks and sweets free to anyone passing.

The city is also a symbol in Sinhalese national memory, the place where the island's Buddhist identity was founded and where Dutugemunu's victory is retold as a national story. That significance made it a target during the civil war and still gives its monuments a political weight beyond the religious one. The region as a whole is predominantly Sinhalese and Buddhist, with Muslim traders in the town and a Tamil minority.

Conduct at the monuments is taken seriously and enforced. Shoulders and knees are covered, shoes and hats come off at the sacred enclosures, and visitors who pose with their backs to Buddha images or climb on statues can expect anger and, in some cases, police involvement. Away from the ruins, manners are those of the rural dry zone: quiet, hospitable and conservative.

The modern town holds several tens of thousands of people, with many times that number across the district. It works as the administrative and commercial centre of the North Central Province, with government offices, a teaching hospital, schools and a university campus, and it serves as the market town for a wide farming hinterland. Paddy grown under the ancient and modern irrigation systems is the mainstay, along with chena plots of chilli, maize and vegetables, and freshwater fisheries in the tanks.

Pilgrimage and tourism form the other half of the economy: guesthouses, restaurants, bicycle hire, tuk-tuk drivers, flower and lamp sellers at the shrines, and the trade that surges at every full moon. Unlike many Sri Lankan destinations, Anuradhapura's visitor flow is mostly domestic, which made it steadier than the coast through the collapse in foreign arrivals after 2019 and the economic crisis of 2022.

Life runs early and late around the heat of the day, with the Nuwara Wewa bund filling with walkers, cyclists and food carts in the cool of the evening. The district's difficulties are those of the dry zone: variable rainfall and dependence on the tanks, human–elephant conflict on the farming frontier, and a chronic kidney disease of uncertain cause that has long affected farming families across the north-central plains. The city also carries the memory of the war years, when it stood on the route north.

Dry-zone cooking is the city's everyday food. Rice and curry here means rice with dhal, pumpkin or ash plantain in coconut milk, jackfruit, long beans or snake gourd, a mallung of gotu kola or other leaves shredded with coconut, papadam, and pol sambol pounded from scraped coconut, chilli, lime and onion. Freshwater fish from the tanks, dried fish and chicken are the common proteins, and village kitchens still cook over firewood in clay pots.

Older dry-zone staples hold their place. Kurakkan, finger millet, is made into dark flatbread and porridge; green gram and cowpeas boiled with coconut are a common breakfast; and ambul thiyal, fish soured with dried goraka, appears on menus alongside dishes from the coast. Because the city fills with pilgrims, vegetarian cooking is unusually easy to find, and milk rice, kiribath, cut into diamonds and eaten with lunu miris, marks poya days and family occasions.

Street and snack food comes from the bus stands and bakeries: short eats in glass cases, kottu chopped noisily on a hot plate, hoppers and string hoppers in the evening, and vadai sold from baskets. Buffalo curd with kithul treacle is the sweet of the region, sold in clay pots along the roads, and the drinks are king coconut, wood-apple pulped with jaggery, beli fruit, and the strong sweet milk tea that punctuates the day.