Rajarajeshwara Temple
— — a thousand-year tower the morning still finds first.
Not only on a wall.
“The great Chola temple at Thanjavur, finished in 1010 and called Rajarajeshvaram for the king who built it. The granite vimana rises about 66 metres above the courtyard, one of the tallest of its kind in southern India. A single monolithic Nandi sits at the eastern door, the courtyard walls long with painted murals. The shadow of the tower never quite falls on the ground at noon, the way the masons meant. from the studio
Rajarajeshwara 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 temple at Thanjavur, originally named Rajarajeshvaram and known today as Brihadisvara, was consecrated in 1010 CE by the Chola emperor Raja Raja I. It stands in the city of Thanjavur in the Kaveri delta of Tamil Nadu, roughly 350 kilometres south of Chennai. The temple is the centrepiece of the Great Living Chola Temples, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1987. The central vimana, the pyramidal tower above the sanctum, rises about 66 metres and is built almost entirely of granite.
The vimana is crowned by a single carved stone cap weighing roughly 80 tonnes, raised more than a thousand years ago without iron or mortar in the walls. The granite for the temple was quarried at a distance — there is no granite at Thanjavur itself — and floated and dragged into the delta. A monolithic Nandi, the bull mount of Shiva, sits at the eastern entrance and is carved from a single block roughly 5 metres long. The inner walls of the ambulatory still carry Chola-period murals, painted in the early eleventh century.
The temple is an active place of worship and is open daily, generally from early morning until late evening with a midday closure. Visitors remove their shoes at the gate and are asked to dress modestly. Photography is permitted in the courtyard but restricted inside the sanctum. Thanjavur is reached by road and rail from Chennai, Tiruchirappalli and Madurai, with regular trains and an airport at Trichy about 60 kilometres west. Two other Chola temples on the UNESCO list, Gangaikondacholapuram and Airavatesvara at Darasuram, are within an easy day's drive.