The compound is assembled of eight main shrines or candis, and more than 250 surrounding individual candis. The three main shrines, called Trisakti (Ind. "three sacred places"), are dedicated to the three gods Shiva the Destroyer, Vishnu the Keeper and Brahma the Creator.
The Shiva shrine at the center contains four chambers, one in every cardinal direction. While the first contains a three meter high statue of Shiva, the other three contain smaller statues of Durga, his wife, Agastya, his teacher, and Ganesha, his son. The statue of Durga is also called temple of Loro Jongrang (slender virgin), after a Javanese princess, daughter of King Boko. She was forced to marry a man she did not love, Bandung Bondowoso. After long negotiations she eventually agreed to the marriage, under the condition that her prince built her a temple ornamented with 1000 statues, between the setting and the rising of the sun. Helped by supernatural beings, the prince was about to succeed. So the princess ordered the women of the village to set a fire in the east of the temple, attempting to make the prince believe that the sun was about to rise. As the cocks began to crow, fooled by the light, the supernatural helpers fled. The prince, furious about the simple trick, changed Loro Jongrang to stone. She became the last and the most beautiful of the thousand statues.
The two other main shrines are that of Vishnu, to the north, and the one of Brahma, facing to the south. In front of each main temple is a smaller candis on the east side, dedicated to the mounts of the respective god - the bull Nandi for Shiva, the gander Angsa for Brahma, and Vishnus Eagle Garuda, which serves as the national symbol of Indonesia (cf. also to the airline Garuda Indonesia).
The bas-reliefs along the twenty sides of the temple depict the Ramayana legend. They illustrate how Sita, the wife of Rama, is abducted by an evil ogre. The monkey king Hanuman brings his army to help Rama and rescue Sita. This story is also shown by the Ramayana Ballet, regularly performed at full moon in front of the illuminated Prambanan complex.
The temple complex is surrounded by more than 250 individual temples of different sizes, called Pewara, believed to have been offered to the king as a sign of submission. The Pewara are arranged in four rows around the central temples, according to the rank of the people allowed to enter them. While the central row was accessible to the priests only, the other three were reserved for the nobles, the knights and the simple people respectively.
