Lingaraja Temple
— — a sandstone tower the eleventh century left standing.
Not only on a wall.
“The tallest of Bhubaneswar's old sandstone temples, in the Ekamra Kshetra quarter on the east coast of India. The deul rises about 55 metres above the courtyard, carved end to end with the figures of a Hindu cosmology the Somavamshi kings put up in the eleventh century. Non-Hindus view it from a platform built outside the boundary wall. Bindusagar tank lies just to the north.
Lingaraja Temple, 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.
Lingaraja Temple stands in the Old Town of Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, on the east coast of India. Bhubaneswar was historically called Ekamra Kshetra, the sacred grove of mango, and once held several hundred sandstone temples; about 50 of them survive in the quarter around Lingaraja today. The temple sits roughly 30 kilometres inland from the Bay of Bengal and about 60 kilometres south of the Sun Temple at Konark. It remains the most active of the city's medieval temples and the principal living shrine of the old Ekamra complex.
Lingaraja was largely completed in the late 11th century under King Jajati Keshari of the Somavamshi dynasty, with the assembly and offering halls added by the Eastern Ganga rulers a century later. The deul, or sanctuary tower, rises about 55 metres above the courtyard in the curvilinear Kalinga style, its outer surface covered end to end with carved figures, scrollwork, and miniature temple forms. The complex is built of khondalite, a coarse local sandstone, and arranged inside a walled enclosure of roughly 250 metres on a side.
The temple is an active place of Hindu worship, and the inner enclosure is closed to non-Hindus, a restriction codified in the 19th century. Visitors of other faiths see the deul from a raised viewing platform built outside the north boundary wall under the British, with a clear sightline across the rooftops. Doors open before dawn and again in the late afternoon; the principal festival, Mahashivaratri in February or March, draws several hundred thousand worshippers and an all-night vigil at the sanctum.