Tiruchirappalli
— a temple town the river bends around.
Not only on a wall.
“A temple town in central Tamil Nadu, where the Kaveri splits around Srirangam island before rejoining south of the city. Above the bazaar, an ancient rock rises eighty-three metres and carries a small shrine at its summit. The rock is older than the temples on it by about a billion years. The light here turns ochre an hour before dusk.
Tiruchirappalli, 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.
Tiruchirappalli sits on the southern bank of the Kaveri in central Tamil Nadu, about three hundred kilometres south of Chennai. It is the fourth-largest city in the state. The river splits here around two islands, Srirangam and Thiruvanaikaval, before continuing toward the delta. The old city wraps around the Rockfort, a single granite outcrop that rises above the bazaar. Trichy, the common short form, has been a seat of dynasties from the Cholas to the Nayaks of Madurai, and is today the principal industrial city of the inland Kaveri belt.
The Rockfort is one of the oldest exposed rocks in the world, with estimates placing the granite at more than one and a half billion years. It rises about eighty-three metres above the surrounding plain. A flight of more than four hundred rock-cut steps climbs from the foot of the hill past the seventh-century Thayumanaswami shrine to the Ucchi Pillayar temple at the summit. From the top the Kaveri and the Srirangam gopurams open out below, with the city plain running on toward the Cauvery delta.
Srirangam, the temple island north of the city, holds the Sri Ranganathaswamy temple, one of the largest functioning Hindu temple complexes in the world, covering about one hundred and fifty-six acres within seven concentric walls. The complex has twenty-one gopurams; the Rajagopuram, completed in 1987, rises seventy-three metres and is among the tallest temple towers in Asia. The shrine to Ranganatha, a reclining form of Vishnu, sits at the innermost enclosure. Non-Hindu visitors may enter the outer prakarams; the inner sanctum is restricted to Hindus.