Massassi Temple

The Massassi Temple, or the Great Temple, was built on Yavin 4 by the Massassi to worship Naga Sadow, a Sith Lord who had enslaved and mutated the Massassi using Sith Alchemy.

The Massassi continued to worship their god at the Temple even after he entered a state of hibernation inside a sarcophagus. They continued to worship there for over a thousand years (long after their god's presumed death at the hands of Freedon Nadd) until Exar Kun eliminated the species.

Kun allowed the Massassi warrior Kalgrath to remain behind, however, guarding the Temple in a state of hibernation. During the Galactic Civil War, the Alliance to Restore the Republic used the Temple as a base during the Battle of Yavin, after retrieving the key from the fabled Yavin Vassilika. Later, Luke Skywalker established his Jedi Praxeum in the Temple.



Internally, the Great Temple was divided into four levels, each representing a step of the ziggurat &mdash; each level was thus larger in floorplan than the one above, but all were outfitted on broadly similar plans with small cells, chambers and corridors around a large central space.

The topmost level, was almost entirely taken up by the Grand Audience Chamber, used as a ceremonial hall by the Alliance garrison and later employed by the Jedi Academy as a teaching space. Under the Alliance, the next level contained officers' quarters, and the base's security, communications and medical facilities, with the central room serving as a command center; the Jedi would later convert this level entirely to accommodation and storage. On the level below, the central chamber was outfitted by the Alliance as the War Room, later re-named as the Strategy Center by the Jedi: this was where the Alliance commanders coordinated the fighter attack on the first Death Star in 0 BBY. The surrrounding rooms on this level, used as stores and technical workshops by the Alliance, were converted by the Jedi to meeting-rooms, communications and computing bays, kitchens and dining halls.

The lowest level of the temple was used by the Rebels and the Jedi alike as a vast hangar bay to store starfighters and other vehicles; there was also a second hangar beneath, plus cellars and catacombs that remained largely unused in both phases of reoccupation. Access to the hangar was by a set of ground-level blast-doors, opening out onto a landing pad.

During the Jedi period, the average ground level around the structure's exterior had risen, so that the main entrance was at War Room level, and many of the students thought of the entire hangar complex as being essentially underground - although the hangar doors must have remained accessible, the area in front of them no longer served as the main landing zone. The entrance faced a clearing, while a river now flowed close to the temple along the other two sides.

The Temple was destroyed down to ground level by the Yuuzhan Vong in 26 ABY, although the underground levels remained partially intact.

Behind the scenes

 * The temple scenery was actually the ruins of a Mayan temple in Tical, Guatemala.

Appearances

 * Tales of the Jedi: The Fall of the Sith Empire
 * Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith
 * Tales of the Jedi: The Sith War
 * Tales of the Jedi: Redemption
 * Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
 * Star Wars Missions 1: Assault on Yavin Four
 * Star Wars Missions 2: Escape from Thyferra
 * Tag and Bink Are Dead
 * Star Wars: Battlefront
 * Star Wars: Battlefront II
 * The Star Wars Holiday Special
 * Imperial Spy
 * Classic Star Wars
 * Jedi Academy Trilogy
 * I, Jedi
 * Jedi Academy: Leviathan
 * Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
 * Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
 * The New Rebellion
 * Young Jedi Knights
 * Junior Jedi Knights
 * Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse
 * Edge of Victory I: Conquest
 * Edge of Victory II: Rebirth