Puri
— — the town the chariots come through.
Not only on a wall.
“A pilgrimage town on the Odisha coast, built around the twelfth-century Jagannath Temple and the wide grey arc of beach where the Bay of Bengal comes in. Once a year, in the monsoon month of Asadha, three enormous wooden chariots are pulled by hand the two kilometres down Bada Danda to the Gundicha Temple, and the road fills with several hundred thousand people. The rest of the year the town keeps its fishermen, its sand, and its long sea wind. from the studio
Puri, 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.
Puri sits on the Bay of Bengal coast in Odisha, about 60 kilometres south of the state capital Bhubaneswar. It is one of the four Char Dham pilgrimage sites of Hindu tradition, alongside Badrinath, Dwarka, and Rameswaram, and the only one on the eastern coast. The town is laid out around the Shree Jagannath Temple, completed in the late twelfth century under King Anantavarman Chodaganga of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, with its 65-metre shikhara visible across most of the town. The Puri beach runs unbroken for several kilometres south of the temple.
The town's year turns on the Rath Yatra, the chariot festival held in the Hindu month of Asadha — June or July on the western calendar. Three new wooden chariots are built each year from neem timber: Nandighosa for Jagannath at sixteen wheels and roughly 14 metres tall, Taladhwaja for Balabhadra, and Darpadalana for Subhadra. They are pulled by tens of thousands of devotees along the two-kilometre Bada Danda from the Jagannath Temple to the Gundicha Temple, and back nine days later. The crowd is regularly reported above a million.
Puri faces the Bay of Bengal on a long unsheltered coast, and the water is the second reason most pilgrims come — the morning sea bath at Swargadwar, the gateway to heaven, is part of the temple visit. The surf is heavy and the gradient is shallow, so traditional nolia fishermen rope themselves to bathers in the early hours. Konark, with its thirteenth-century Sun Temple carved as a chariot of twenty-four wheels and seven horses, sits 35 kilometres up the coast and is reached by the Marine Drive road along the dunes.