Mahabaleshwar Temple
— — a stone the gods could not lift back.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Dravidian temple set a few streets back from the beach in Gokarna, on the Karnataka coast. The walls are weathered laterite, the roof tiled and tiered, and a single corridor of polished stone leads in toward the sanctum. The deity is the Atmalinga, the soul-linga said in the Ramayana to have been carried south by Ravana and set down here by a trick of Ganesha. Pilgrims have come for many centuries; the town around it has stayed small and salt-bleached.
Mahabaleshwar 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.
The Mahabaleshwar Temple stands in the centre of Gokarna, a small temple town in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, on India's Konkan coast. The town sits between two rivers — the Gangavali to the north and the Aghanashini to the south — and faces the Arabian Sea across a long crescent beach. Gokarna is counted among the seven Mukti Sthalas, or salvation sites, of the Indian peninsula, alongside Udupi, Kollur, Subrahmanya, Kumbasi, Koteshwara, and Sankaranarayana. The temple itself is generally dated to the fourth century, in classical Dravidian style.
The temple is built of laterite blocks faced with carved granite at the doorways and pillars, in a compact two-storey Dravidian plan with a tiered tile roof rather than a tall gopuram. At the centre of the sanctum sits the Atmalinga, said to be a self-manifested Shiva linga roughly six feet tall, set in a square stone yoni and only fully revealed to pilgrims once every forty years. Smaller shrines to Ganesha, Chandikeshwara, and Adi Gokarneshwara line the inner courtyard.
Gokarna is reached by road or rail from Mangalore, roughly 230 kilometres to the south, or from Goa, roughly 145 kilometres to the north; the nearest railway station is Gokarna Road on the Konkan Railway. Non-Hindu visitors may enter the outer precincts of the temple but generally not the inner sanctum, in line with practice at most South Indian temples. A traditional dress code applies — men remove shirts in the inner courtyard and wear a dhoti, women wear a sari or salwar. The town fills during Mahashivaratri each spring.