Thrissur
— the city that keeps the drumbeat.
Not only on a wall.
“A temple town and the cultural capital of Kerala, set on the green coastal plain between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea. The Vadakkunnathan Temple sits on a low hill at the centre of the city, ringed by the open ground where every April the Pooram festival fills the air with caparisoned elephants and the slow build of the chenda drum.
Thrissur, 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.
Thrissur is the headquarters of Thrissur district in central Kerala, on the coastal plain about seventy-five kilometres north of Kochi. The city grew around the Vadakkunnathan Temple, a Shiva temple on the low hill known as Thekkinkadu Maidan; inscriptions place the current structure in the ninth century, though tradition holds the site far older. With roughly 315,000 residents in the city core, Thrissur lies in the rice-and-coconut belt between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, served by a major junction on the Shoranur–Cochin Harbour railway line and the Kerala state highway grid.
The Thrissur Pooram, held in April or May on the Pooram asterism of the Malayalam month of Medam, is the largest temple festival in Kerala. Two factions — Paramekkavu and Thiruvambady — assemble around thirty caparisoned elephants on the Thekkinkadu Maidan around the Vadakkunnathan Temple, accompanied by chenda melam ensembles of more than two hundred percussionists. The festival was organised in its present form by Sakthan Thampuran, the Maharaja of Cochin, in the late eighteenth century, and now draws several hundred thousand visitors over a thirty-six-hour stretch.
The Vadakkunnathan Temple admits only Hindus to its inner shrines, but the surrounding Thekkinkadu Maidan and the outer prakaram are open to all visitors during daylight. The Kerala State Museum, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, and the State Art Gallery cluster within a kilometre of the temple hill. The nearest airport is Cochin International, about fifty kilometres south; trains stop at Thrissur Railway Station on the main coastal line through Kerala. The city is walkable around the maidan, and auto-rickshaws cover the rest.