Place · temple city · India
Ekāmra Kshetra, Bhubaneswar
The ancient temple town at Bhubaneswar in Odisha — Ekamra Kshetra — where around 700 Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples once stood between the 3rd century BCE and the 15th century CE. About 150 survive, including the Lingaraja (c.1100), Mukteshvara (c.950), Rajarani (c.1100), Parasuramesvara (c.650), and Vaital Deul (c.800). The Ekamra Kshetra is the architectural laboratory of the Kalinga temple style — the evolution from the Parasuramesvara's experimental late-Gupta plan through the mature Lingaraja is traceable across the city's wards in a single sequential walking tour. UNESCO tentative list since 2014 as a serial nomination of the 10 principal temples. The Ananta Vasudeva (c.1278) is the only major Vaishnava temple in the group.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.238, 85.834
Connections (5)
- Shared site withLingaraja, Bhubaneswar
Ekāmra Kshetra is the old temple city around Lingarāja: some five hundred surviving shrines in one Bhubaneswar neighbourhood, the Bindusāgar tank at its centre, and every stage of the Kalinga order from seventh-century Parashurāmeshvara onward standing within walking distance of each other. The tank is where the Lingarāja's deity is brought for the annual boat festival, so the neighbourhood's five hundred temples are organised around one piece of water.
- Site adjacencyHirapur Chausath Yogini Temple
Bhubaneswar's five hundred temples and the Hirapur yogini shrine fifteen kilometres away are the two halves of Odishan religion in the same century: the great Shaiva establishment with its walled compounds and closed sanctums, and a small roofless circle of sixty-four goddesses on open ground outside the town. Yogini temples were sited away from temple cities because the practice was not one the establishment wanted inside its precincts, and the distance is the evidence.
- Alternative toKonark Sun Temple
Konark was inscribed in 1984 and Bhubaneswar's several hundred Kalinga temples have been on the tentative list since 2014. Konark is a single ruined monument; Ekamra Kshetra is the entire development of the style from the seventh century to the thirteenth, in a working city. The first is easier to nominate and the second is more important, which is the recurring problem with this list.
- Site withinBhubaneswar
Ekāmra Kshetra, Bhubaneswar sits inside Bhubaneswar and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
- Site adjacencyTārā-Tāriṇī Pitha
Tārā-Tāriṇī Pitha above the Rushikulya in Ganjam and the Ekāmra Kshetra temple city of Bhubaneswar form two of the main Odia Shakta-Shaiva centres, connected by the medieval pilgrim circuit of the Tantric Trikona of Odisha — Tara-Tarini (breast), Biraja at Jajpur (navel) and Vimala within the Jagannath temple at Puri (feet). Pilgrims who perform the full three-pitha circuit in the Chaitra Yatra fortnight begin at Tara-Tarini on Kumari hill above Berhampur and move north through Bhubaneswar's temple city to Jajpur and Puri.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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