A fourteenth-century shrine whose drummers' hall carries the most celebrated wood carving in Sri Lanka.
The timber pillars are covered with carved panels — dancers, wrestlers, swans, a double-headed eagle, entwined creepers — in hundreds of distinct designs, executed with joinery that uses no nails. This is the surviving high point of the Navandanna craft tradition, and one of the clearest cases where the work is famous and the community that produced it is not.