Triyuginarayan Temple
— — the fire that has not gone out.
Not only on a wall.
“A small stone temple in the Garhwal hills above Sonprayag, where a wood fire is said to have burned without pause since Shiva married Parvati. Pilgrims add a log on their way past. The smoke darkens the rafters. Most days the courtyard is quiet, the sound mostly wind moving through deodar.
Triyuginarayan 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.
Triyuginarayan sits in the Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand, at about 1,980 metres in the Garhwal Himalayas, reached by a steep road climbing from Sonprayag on the route to Kedarnath. The temple's stone tower is small by Himalayan standards and shares the form of the larger Kedarnath shrine, ascribed in regional accounts to the eighth-century reformer Adi Shankara. The village holds perhaps a hundred residents and four sacred kunds, the small bathing tanks fed by springs that pilgrims use before entering the shrine.
The temple is associated with the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, witnessed by Vishnu — hence Narayan in the name — and the akhand dhuni, the unbroken fire in the courtyard, is held to have burned since that wedding across three yugas. Couples travel from across India to recite vows beside it; many leave a small piece of firewood on the woodpile against the wall. The temple gates close in winter when the Kedarnath route shuts and the village empties down toward Sonprayag.
The air at this elevation is thin and woodsmoke-scented. Deodar cedars and rhododendron cover the slopes around the village, and on clear mornings the white wall of the Kedarnath range shows to the north. The road in from Sonprayag climbs roughly twelve kilometres of hairpins above the Mandakini river; landslides during the monsoon close it without warning. May and June, before the rains, and late September through October are the months the village sees the most visitors. Nights drop close to freezing even in early summer.