Chennakesava Temple at Somanathapura Mysore
— — the morning soapstone learned to be lace.
Not only on a wall.
“A Hoysala temple from 1268, raised on a star-shaped platform in a quiet Karnataka village. Three shrines share one inner platform, every centimetre of the soapstone carved into rows of elephants, horsemen, deities and dancers. The compound is small enough to walk in twenty minutes and demands an hour. Mornings before the bus tours arrive, the light comes in low along the colonnade.
Chennakesava Temple at Somanathapura Mysore, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chennakesava Temple sits in Somanathapura, a village on the Kaveri River about thirty-eight kilometres east of Mysuru in Karnataka. It was completed in 1268 CE under the Hoysala king Narasimha III, commissioned by the general Soma Dandanayaka, after whom the village is named. The temple is the last of the three great Hoysala monuments, alongside Belur and Halebidu, and the most architecturally complete of the surviving examples. In 2023 UNESCO inscribed it as part of the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas World Heritage site.
The temple is built from chloritic schist, a fine soapstone soft enough to cut almost like wood when freshly quarried and hardening with exposure. The Hoysala carvers used that window to work the entire exterior into successive horizontal friezes — elephants below, then horsemen, then scrollwork, then narrative panels from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana, and a top tier of deities. Many panels are signed by their carvers, an unusual practice in Indian temple architecture. The trikuta plan sets three shrines, to Janardhana, Kesava and Venugopala, on a single raised platform.
The site is managed by the Archaeological Survey of India and opens daily from 8:30 to 5:30, with a small entry fee. The temple is no longer in active worship, because the principal Kesava idol was damaged during the regional turbulence of the fourteenth century, so visitors may walk the whole platform freely. Mysuru is the nearest base, an hour by road via Bannur. Early morning light catches the eastern friezes; late afternoon falls along the south. Photography of the exterior is permitted; interior flash is not.