Place · Utpala temples · India
Avantipora temples
Also known as Awantipora Temples
The 9th-century Avantiswami Vishnu temple and the Avantishvara Shiva temple at Avantipur in Pulwama district, Kashmir — the ruins of the capital city built by King Avantivarman (ruled 855-883) of the Utpala dynasty, the predecessor state to Lalitaditya's Karkota rulers. Both temples are in the Kashmir Valley style — massive stone construction with trefoil arches and pyramidal roofs, a distinct regional idiom that drew on Gandharan and Hellenistic forms. The buildings were destroyed by Sultan Sikandar 'Butshikan' between 1389 and 1413 during his iconoclastic campaign. The ASI preserves the ruins; access was limited during the Kashmir conflict and only reopened to tourism in 2015. UNESCO tentative list since 2010 as part of the Kashmir temples serial nomination.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.920, 75.010
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageMārtānd Sun Temple
Avantivarman's paired Shiva and Vishnu temples at Avantipora, built in the ninth century, continue the Kashmiri order that Lalitaditya's Martand established a century earlier — the peristyle courtyard, the trefoil arch within a triangular pediment, the fluted columns that look Greek and are not. Both are ruins now, and between them they are most of what survives of an architectural tradition that has no parallel anywhere else in India.
- Companion in the same setParihaspora
Parihāsapura was Lalitāditya's Karkota capital in the eighth century and Awantipora Avantivarman's Utpala foundation in the ninth, and both are now mounds and plinths because their stone was carried off for later building. Kalhana's Rājatarangini describes both in detail, which makes Kashmir the one Indian region where a sustained historical narrative in Sanskrit can be set against the archaeology of the places it describes.
- Canonised by textRājataraṅgiṇī
Kalhana attributes Avantipura and its two temples to Avantivarman, the founder of the Utpala line, and credits his engineer Suyya with the drainage works that reclaimed the valley's flooded land. The temples were themselves buried under flood silt for a thousand years and dug out in the 1900s, which is a fair summary of the relationship between the chronicle and the ground.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Awantipora”. Epigraphia Indica and the Annual Reports on Indian Epigraphy (Archaeological Survey of India).
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