Candi Cetho

7.5956°S, 111.1581°E.

Candi Cetho on the western slope of Mount Lawu in Central Java, Indonesia — a fifteenth-century Hindu temple complex dated to approximately 1350–1450 CE during the final phase of the Majapahit empire. The site consists of thirteen successive stepped terraces ascending the mountainside, with the upper terraces containing small pyramidal platforms, a sanctuary building, and a series of inscribed stones recording dedicatory information. The upper sanctuary preserves a stone lingam-and-yoni of substantial size and a relief of the Garuda-bird carrying Vishnu — both clearly Hindu in iconography but executed in a distinctively Javanese architectural and decorative idiom. The temple was the highest-elevation Hindu sanctuary in Java at the time of its construction and one of the last major Hindu temples built on the island before the Islamic conversion of central Java in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Excavated by Dutch and Indonesian missions through the twentieth century.

A thirteen-terrace ascending Hindu temple complex on the slope of an active volcano, in the last century of public Hindu worship in Java before the Islamic transition.