Pattadakal Group of Monuments
— — two architectures meeting on one riverbank.
Not only on a wall.
“A bend in the Malaprabha river where the Chalukya kings of Badami built their coronation temples in the seventh and eighth centuries. Ten principal shrines stand close together on a flat sandstone plain, some built in the southern Dravida manner with stepped pyramidal towers, others in the northern Nagara curve. The Virupaksha temple holds the centre of the group. The river runs slow here, the stone reads warm in the late sun, and the place has the particular stillness of a site that has outlasted the kingdom that raised it. from the studio
Pattadakal Group of Monuments, 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.
Pattadakal sits on the left bank of the Malaprabha river in Bagalkot district, northern Karnataka, about 22 kilometres from Badami and 10 from Aihole — the three sites form the Chalukya architectural triangle. The group of monuments was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 as a high point of seventh- and eighth-century Indian temple architecture. Ten major temples and several smaller shrines stand together on the plain. The Chalukyas of Badami used the site for royal coronations, and the surviving inscriptions name the kings, the patrons, and in several cases the architects themselves.
The temples are cut from the local pink sandstone, the same warm rock that shows in the Badami cliffs to the west. Four of the principal shrines — Sangameshwara, Virupaksha, Mallikarjuna, and the unfinished Jambulinga — follow the southern Dravida idiom, with stepped pyramidal towers (vimanas) over the sanctum. Four others — Galaganatha, Kashi Vishwanatha, Jambulinga, Kadasiddheshwara, and the Papanatha — work the northern Nagara idiom, with curvilinear shikharas. The Virupaksha, completed around 740 CE by Queen Lokamahadevi to mark her husband Vikramaditya II's victory over the Pallavas, is the largest and the most precisely worked.
The site is open daily from sunrise to sunset under the Archaeological Survey of India, with a small admission fee at the gate. Most visitors come up from Badami, 22 kilometres south, and combine Pattadakal with Aihole and the Badami cave temples in a single day. The closest railhead is Badami; Hubli (Hubballi) airport is about three hours by road. October through February is the cool season and the easiest months for an unhurried walk; the summer sun on the open stone is hard from April through June. An annual dance festival is held on the temple platforms in late January or February.