The history of the urn library is deeply linked to the modern history of Cambodia and the struggle of Cambodians to reclaim their past.
In 2015, my sister, Keo Kolthida Ekkasakh, passed away after a long battle with cancer. She was born deaf and was the youngest of five sisters, two years apart from me, and we were the best of friends throughout our lives. Her death was extremely difficult for me, and I pledged to become a monk at Wat Langka (pagoda) after her death.
After she passed away, the monks encouraged me to meditate by walking around the pagoda. I was walking around Preah Vihear at Wat Langka and happened to notice a light coming from the lamp on the Buddha statue.
I managed to persuade the monks to move the statue to see where the light was coming from. It took 15 people to move the cement Buddha and they discovered a hidden cave that was locked behind a large door. The gate looked very dark and scary, but we decided to open it to find out what was behind it. When we opened it, we found piles and piles of urns covered in cobwebs and dust.
Wat Langka gave me permission to take the urns out to catalogue and photograph them and we identified 464 urns. As Wat Langka has not yet found the remains of Venerable Preah Nhanapavaravichea Louis Em (Vajirappanno), it is thought that his remains may be among these hundreds of urns. Venerable Preah Nhanapavaravichea Louis Em (Vajirappanno) was the first head of the pagoda in 1912, and is credited with the extraordinary honour of completing the construction of this sacred pagoda.
Most of the urns were so degraded that it was impossible to identify the writing on them, let alone determine their age. Some of the urns are dated, and we can say that they were left behind during Cambodia's civil war in the 1980s, and some in the early 1990s. However, we have learned, and it is our belief, that many of these urns were abandoned during the evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975.
Shortly after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in April 1975, they forced the entire population to leave the city to live and work in cooperatives. People were forced to leave the capital with only the things they could carry, and some people took the remains of their families to Wat Langka for safekeeping - probably in the hope of being able to claim the ballot box on their return to Phnom Penh.
The monk who accepted these urns in the 1970s has since passed away and, apparently, knowledge of this hidden cave disappeared with him, as no one at Wat Langka knew about this secret cave until it was rediscovered in 2015.
With the generous help of the US Embassy, the US Agency for International Development and the US Navy Seabees in Japan, we had ten wooden cabinets built for the urns, which are now kept in these cabinets at Wat Langka.
Since we discovered the urns and placed them in a more respectful location at Wat Langka, we have been making announcements about the existence of the urns in the hope that families will come forward to claim them. According to Buddhist tradition, these urns cannot be abandoned and must be treated with respect. However, almost eight years have passed since the urns were discovered and only nine families have come forward to claim them. We believe that, at least for the urns left behind during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, there are no living family members who were present during the 1975 evacuation to claim these urns.
After discussions with the head of Wat Langka (pagoda), Samdech Preah Thammalikhet Dr Sao Chanthol, and his pagoda committee, they decided to dedicate a set of rooms in Wat Langka not only to preserve these urns, but also to serve as a library and a place where visitors can learn, meditate and reflect on the history, culture and spiritual significance of the urns in the context of Cambodia's identity, the Buddhist tradition and humanity in general.
Wat Langka has even set aside two small rooms for visitors to stay overnight, as well as another room for prayer. This is the story of Wat Langka's ‘library of urns’, which houses these urns, a history book about the library and other historical and religious texts.
In many ways, the preservation and protection of these urns is an extension of Raphael Lemkin's vision, which since 1944 has aimed to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. Before arriving at the current legal definition of the crime of genocide, Lemkin identified the destruction of cultural artefacts and heritage as a kind of cultural genocide. Recovering, respecting and protecting these urns, which were almost lost by the Khmer Rouge regime nearly 50 years ago during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, is part of the ongoing struggle to respond to the cultural genocide of the past, which continues to afflict Cambodia and humanity today.
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