Meenakshi Temple
— — gopuram towers that hold the sky in their colour.
Not only on a wall.
“The Meenakshi Amman temple stands at the centre of old Madurai, its fourteen gopuram towers carrying tier on tier of painted figures — gods, animals, attendants — over the surrounding streets. The southern gopuram rises about 52 metres. Inside the concentric enclosures sit the twin shrines to Meenakshi and Sundareswarar, the Golden Lotus tank, and the long Thousand-Pillar Hall. The colour on the towers is repainted every twelve years in the Kumbhabhishekam. — from the studio
Meenakshi 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 Meenakshi Amman Temple sits at the heart of Madurai, a city of about 1.5 million on the Vaigai river in southern Tamil Nadu. The temple is dedicated to the goddess Meenakshi, a form of Parvati, and to her consort Sundareswarar, a form of Shiva — an unusual pairing in which the goddess is named first. The present complex was largely rebuilt under the Nayak dynasty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the long reign of Tirumala Nayak between 1623 and 1655.
The complex is laid out as a set of concentric rectangular enclosures, with the two main shrines at the centre and fourteen gopurams piercing the outer walls. The four outer gopurams range between roughly 49 and 52 metres in height and carry thousands of painted stucco figures — deities, dvarapalakas, attendant musicians, mythical animals — restored and repainted in the Kumbhabhishekam consecration roughly every twelve years. The Ayirakkal Mandapam, the hall of a thousand pillars, contains 985 carved granite columns from the sixteenth century, several of which sound as musical pillars when struck.
Madurai is reached by daily flights from Chennai, Bengaluru, and Delhi to Madurai International Airport, about 12 kilometres south of the old city. The temple is open in the morning and again in the late afternoon and evening, with the central shrines closed to non-Hindus. Footwear is left at the gate; phones and cameras are restricted inside. The Chithirai festival in April and May, lasting roughly two weeks, draws over a million pilgrims to the city.