Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam
— — the largest working Hindu temple in the world, and still a neighbourhood.
Not only on a wall.
“The Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple sits on an island in the Kaveri River at Srirangam, just north of Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu. It is the largest functioning Hindu temple complex on earth, spread across roughly sixty hectares and ringed by seven concentric walls. Twenty-one gopurams rise above the streets; the southern Rajagopuram, finished in 1987, stands 73 metres tall. Lanes of houses, shops, and tea stalls run between the inner walls.
Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam, 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.
Srirangam is an island town in the Kaveri River, immediately north of the city of Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, southern India. The Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple occupies the heart of the island, roughly 156 acres in area, dedicated to Ranganatha, a reclining form of the god Vishnu. Seven concentric rectangular walled enclosures, called prakaras, surround the central sanctum; the outer three contain the working streets of the town. Twenty-one gopurams, or gateway towers, mark the cardinal entrances through the walls.
The Rajagopuram, the southern gateway, is the tallest temple tower in Asia at 73 metres across thirteen stuccoed tiers, completed in 1987 after a building programme that stretched across four centuries. The thousand-pillared hall in the outermost enclosure, dating to the Vijayanagara period in the sixteenth century, holds in fact 953 carved granite columns. The earliest stone structures of the temple go back to the Chola dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries. Inscriptions on the walls record grants from at least nine successor dynasties.
The temple's calendar peaks at Vaikuntha Ekadasi in the Tamil month of Margazhi (December to January), when the Paramapada Vasal, the gate to the inner sanctum, is opened for a single day. More than a million pilgrims pass through the gate over the festival's twenty-one days. The Adi Brahmotsavam in summer and the Panguni Uthiram festival in spring each draw their own crowds. Daily worship runs in six prescribed services from before dawn until late evening, year after year.