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PODCAST

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

The Ceylon Press

From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan.

society & culture places & travel

All Episodes

32:07

Inscrutable Angels: an Outing to Sri Lanka’s Skinkdom

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/10/13

Einstein – or perhaps it was Sun Tzu – argued that subtle is as subtle does. If they are correct then the very existence of this podcast threatens the salient virtue of Sri Lanka’s most elusive animals with a terrible undoing. But it’s a risk worth taking.Big, bold, and marvellous though so much of what is immediately encountered in Sri Lanka, more marvellous even that all you might ever encounter here, is everything that at first sight looks most ordinary. Running alongside its elephants

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21:23

In Search Of The Devil Bird: Encounters with Sri...

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/10/13

This podcasts is a search for Sri Lanka’s notorious Devil Bird, encountering on the way, all 12 of its distinguished owls. Once upon a time, uncountable centuries ago, a woman sat done to enjoy a curry supper with her husband. With hindsight, she ought to have been more alert: after all, her husband making dinner was no usual thing. But then, nor was the curry, for nestling amongst the spices and vegetables she discovered a tiny finger. All that was left of her infant son. Suspicion,

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16:44

Sri Lanka’s Secret Spices

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/09/30

Beneath the glamours quills of cinnamon or vines of pepper, Sri Lanka’s two most dazzling indigenous spices, hide a clutch of others – the secret spices whose clandestine contribution to food and medicine is the subject of this podcast. Many of Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices are barely known outside the island; indeed, so far as Tesco, Walmart or Carrefour go, they remain inscrutable, ingredients of electrifying mystery. But collectively, they may well have been what Virginia Woolf had in

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21:57

The Golden Trinity: Sri Lanka’s Three Great Spices

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/09/30

It took just three homespun goddess - Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia - to give their ancient Mediterranean world all the perfection it needed; its charm, beauty, and creativity. And so it is with the three great indigenous spcies of Sri Lanka: cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric. Native to the island, it is impossible to image how life would be here without them. The greatest of these is cinnamon. Its perfumed bushes mark out the outer edge of the spice garden at The Flame Tree Estate &

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32:50

Monsoon, Magic & Money: Sri Lanka, The Spice Trade &...

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/09/30

Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler; and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went

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30:14

The Taste Trade: Sri Lanka’s Merchant Spices

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/09/30

This podcast is dedicated to uncovering the story of those most favoured of Sri Lankan spices that came to the island – just like tourists. And then stayed. On the distant streets of the Old Bailey in London stands F. W. Pomeroy's famous 1906 statue of Justice hanging above the entrance to Central Criminal Court. The vast and gilded Amazonian holds in one hand the sword of justice and in the other the finely balanced scales of justice. And is in in thinking how Sri Lanka’s spice history

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18:17

Spices of Empire: Sri Lanka’s Colonial Spices

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/09/30

Sri Lanka’s generous habit of annexing new ingredients is one of the more positive ways in which it has reacted to the very mixed impact made on it by the island’s spice-mad colonial occupiers; and its traders. To the nine core spices indigenous to the island since the earliest of times, - cinnamon, pepper, long pepper, brindleberries, moringa, curry leaves, gutu kula, the blue butterfly pea flower, and turmeric – up to thirteen others have been introduced through the centuries and have

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3:20

The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka: Part 3

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/06/01

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Welcome to the third and final episode of a three part podcast dedicated to finding the 7 greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka. Reservoir, tree, stupas. All came before this, ancient Sri Lanka’s fourth great wonder - a palace built to escape death and suffering. Bulit by the self-same great king,

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3:20

The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka: Part 2

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/06/01

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Welcome to the second episode of a three part podcast dedicated to finding the 7 greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka.250 years after the creation of the island’s first great wonder – the reservoir of Panda Wewa, the second took root - literally. Strictly speaking this wonder was not home grown – but

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3:20

The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part Two

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/06/01

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Welcome to Part Two of a two part Podcast dedicated to Sri Lanka’s most wicked monarchs. After the excesses of Prince Vijaya and Queen Annua, it is time to encounter our third candidate king and winner of an abiding place in the island’s register of wicked monarchs. So little is actually known about

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3:20

In Serach of Sri Lanka's Tiny Mammals

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/06/01

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Tiny mammals are the subject of this podcast – the search for Sri Lanka’s smallest and most overlooked mammals. But first a health warning – for fans of Hi, Hallo or Hola, this is not a story of Sri Lanka’s mammalian celebrities, its kings and queens, or its most photographed princelings. Rather, it is a

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3:20

Rambling in the Outer Gardens

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/06/01

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________This episode is dedicated to the sprawling plantation gardens that disappear off into the jungle around Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This longer of two walks, which we call THE ESTATE WALK, starts at THE PODI PATH just outside the front porch that leads into the hotel. A traditional kitchen

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3:20

Secret Kandy: Five Forgotten Stories

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/25

Thirty miles north of Kandy marks the start of an extraordinary 5 temple circuit tour to places long lost to modern travellers. The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife – nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. Shew was also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of

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3:20

Secret Kandy: The 200 Year Old War

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/25

This episode is dedicated to a 200 year old mountain war. Hills are of course what Kandy is celebrated for - and its most famous city-centre mountain, Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, is home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. It was once, more memorably, home to some atypical human sacrifice, involving a particularly beautiful girl, Dingiri Menika who lived right next to the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, in Galagedera. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of a Kandyan

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3:20

Secret Kandy: God & Manon

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/25

Kipling believed that to understand a country and its history you had to smell it. Yet the past is documented in so many other ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. Even so, their stories, like their secrets, are often hard to capture, and harder still to comprehend. It is thought that there are well over 1,000 temples scattered in and around Kandy and its hinterland. Few are properly documented and remain secrets

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3:20

Secret Kandy: Where The Grass Is Grreener

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/22

One of Kandy’s greatest and most wonderful secrets is its nature. The city sits in a valley surrounded by 5 main hills, up which, like an indulgent bubble bath, buildings of later regret have begun to creep. But one side of the city remains nicely protected - UdawaththaKele Forest. Once a forest hunting reserve for the kings, it is now a magical 104 hectare protected nature reserve. It is home to 460 plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet,

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0:15

Secret Kandy: Down City Streets

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/22

This episode is dedicated to a walk down the secretive streets of Kandy. Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why. Kandy’s

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0:15

Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/11

This episode is dedicated to the party that lasted for 22 years. Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders; albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity. Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the ending of the ancient world itself – 500 CE, for just 5 years beforehand that the ancient world itself had come crashing to a

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0:15

The 50 Best Hotels

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/05/11

Of Sri Lanka’s 10,000+ places listed as offering accommodation, the greater majority are privately let villas and apartments, supplemented by homestays. Less than a quarter of its accommodation is classified as a hotel 2,500 in all. A third of these hotels are 4-star and less than 8% (200) are rated as 5-star. For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most

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0:15

The Garden Companion

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast ·

2025/03/19

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast. The Garden Companion is the subject of this podcast – a tour of the sometimes-unruly gardens of Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens, not love, occupied my childish imaginings. There was mud – lots of it;

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