Most gems of our jewels were formed and found in and around Ratnapura (ratna - gem, pura - city), Sri Lanka, where I spent a year in 2006 with a mining-family among other mining-families, as back in those

It is Saturday morning, the sun has just risen, so, no wonder I get a little upset when somebody starts to croak in front of my window. I run outside where I see Soma, one of our neighbors with a ceremonial

“Tomorrow we are getting up early! We will remember my father on the 10th anniversary of his death, so we are giving dane at a home for elderly men. The women of our family have been cooking the meals

Now that we have bought the lotus flowers, the oil, the wicks and the incense, we start barefooted to the main temple of Saman Devio, who is the protecting God of our province. It is a Buddhist temple,

Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi is an officially sacred fig tree in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, the capital of the country’s ancient kings. The oldest living human-planted tree in the world is more than 2300 years old,

It’s all beautiful, everything is so clean and ordered, people live in abundance – but they don’t smile – a Sri Lankan friend of mine said that having come back from Europe. Traveling to Europe, home of

The rumbling traffic suddenly gets still, the busy downtown of Ratnapura city freezes, all directions stop: a little squirrel went astray, onto the busy road. He is practically surrounded by vehicles and

Even when it was still raw I often admired the gem of our “Hidden Miracle” necklace. Showing its amazing beauty on a much bigger surface and on a much more natural way than traditionally faceted gems,

In Ratnapura it rains every day, that is the first all-truth, and the first Sinhalese sentence I learned. We are in the rainforest zone, in the middle of the mountains, occupying the center of the island.

A European, like myself, who is able to spend a year with a Sri Lankan miner-family, will surely find her way back to her natural being. Making friends with spiders in the bathroom, containing myself when

“You have never seen such a beautiful topaz, have you?” a stubby man asks me with a shrewd smile. He is the first to speak up among the eager gem traders hanging around the mines. “Nice stone.” I’m turning

Sri Pada – or Adam’s Peak as it was called by their British conquerors’– is the holiest mountain of the country. That’s where our personal story began, just as everything in and around Ratnapura, as all

After the Great Fortune, the kattie, accompanied by family members and friends go to the Saman Devali which is the biggest and most important temple of Saman Devio, the protecting God of the province,

“I know there is sapphire in the well!” Sunil has been saying for a while now. “We are going to strip that well!” He means our well behind the house, where we get our delicious drinking water from. The

There are only three places in the world whose land is richer in gems than Sri Lanka’s. The first is Columbia, which yields 90 percent of the world’s emerald supply, then the African diamond mines, followed

The Serendib Gem jewels are born out of love, as a matter of fact, a consecutive bursts of love. At first I fell in love with this small tropical island. It has amazing diversity from rocky, sandy or

Serendib was one of Sri Lanka’s many ancient names. All of them were connected to the island’s exceptional rich gem deposits. So there is nothing to wonder when looking at the English word “serendipity,”