Girnar
— — the mountain you climb before sunrise.
Not only on a wall.
“A granite massif rising from the plain in Saurashtra, sacred to Jains and Hindus for more than two thousand years. Pilgrims start the climb in the dark, by lantern light, because the heat comes early and the stone holds it late. Near the summit, a cluster of marble temples — most of them Jain, the oldest from the twelfth century — sit on five separate peaks. Monkeys keep their own counsel along the steps. Tea sellers set up at the landings. The whole walk is roughly ten thousand stone steps, and the people who climb it talk about it for the rest of their lives. — from the studio
Girnar, 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.
Girnar rises above the city of Junagadh in Saurashtra, the westernmost peninsula of Gujarat. The highest of its five peaks, Gorakhnath, reaches roughly 1,031 metres and is one of the tallest summits in the state. The mountain is a single granite intrusion older than the surrounding Deccan basalt, and Ashokan rock edicts carved at its foot in the third century BCE are among the earliest surviving inscriptions in India. The Jain temple complex at the saddle, anchored by the twelfth-century Neminatha temple, marks the site where the twenty-second Tirthankara is held to have attained moksha.
The temples at the saddle are cut from white Makrana-style marble carried up the mountain by hand over centuries. The Neminatha temple, consecrated in 1129 CE under the patronage of the Solanki minister Sajjana, sits inside a walled enclosure of smaller shrines and pillared halls; the nearby Mallinatha and Adinatha temples follow the same pattern of carved domes over square sanctums. The granite of the path itself is the older stone — Precambrian, polished by ten centuries of pilgrim feet. The full ascent is held to be 9,999 steps; in practice it is closer to ten thousand and change.
The climb begins at Taleti, on the southern edge of Junagadh, and most pilgrims set out between 3 and 5 in the morning to reach the Jain saddle by sunrise. A ropeway opened in 2020 carries visitors to the Ambaji peak in roughly seven minutes, though the traditional route on foot remains the way most Jains make the journey. October through February is the cool season; the monsoon from June to September makes the steps slick and the higher peaks unsafe. Modest dress is expected at all temples, and leather is left at the gate.