Place · caravanserai & temple compound · Pakistan
Gor Khatri, Peshawar
A walled compound on the highest point of Peshawar's old city that has been almost everything in turn. Jahānārā Begum, Shāh Jahān's daughter, laid it out as a caravanserai; under Sikh rule the governor Paolo Avitabile used it as his residence and a Gorakhnāth temple was built inside; the British made it a deputy commissioner's office and then a fire station; it is now an archaeological museum, and excavation in the courtyard has gone down to Indo-Greek levels.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.009, 71.582
Worth knowing
The name is read either as the warriors' graves or as Gorakh's place, and the compound has held a Mughal caravanserai, a Nath temple, a Sikh governor's house, a colonial fire station and a museum of the levels beneath its own floor.
Connections (4)
- Pitha network withTillā Jogiān
Two Nath sites west of the Ravi, and between them most of what the order left in the north-west. Tillā Jogiān on the Salt Range was the chief Punjabi establishment, used for the forty-day retreat that gives the discipline its shape, and janamsakhi tradition puts Guru Nanak on the hill in conversation with its jogis. Gor Khatri in Peshawar held a Gorakhnāth temple built under Sikh rule on ground that may have been Nath much earlier. The Naths were the one ascetic order that held the whole corridor from Peshawar to Gorakhpur.
- Site adjacencyPurushapura / Peshawar
Gor Khatri stands on the highest point of Peshawar's old city, which means it stands on the accumulated mound of Purushapura. Excavation in its courtyard has gone down through the Mughal caravanserai and the Sikh and Hindu Shahi levels to Indo-Greek material, so the compound is a vertical section of the city under its own floor. The enclosure has been in turn Jahānārā Begum's sarai, Avitabile's residence, a Gorakhnāth temple, a colonial fire station and an archaeological museum of itself.
- Site adjacencyMahābat Khān Mosque, Peshawar
The mosque and the enclosure stand a few hundred metres apart on the high ground of Peshawar's old city, and both were taken over when the Sikhs held the city in the 1820s and 1830s. Mahābat Khān's minarets were used as gallows. Gor Khatri became the residence of Paolo Avitabile, the Neapolitan mercenary Ranjīt Singh installed as governor, who ran Peshawar by public execution and is still a figure in Pashto idiom for arbitrary authority. The Mughal city's two chief monuments served one administration's methods.
- Site withinPurushapura / Peshawar
The Gor Khatri monumental complex sits within Peshawar (ancient Purushapura) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The 1-century Kushan Buddhist monastery (where Xuanzang reported the Buddha's begging bowl in 630 CE) was converted into a Mughal caravanserai by Jahangir's wife Nur Jahan in 1641, then a Sikh fire temple under Ranjit Singh's governor Avitabile in the 1830s, and now serves as the Peshawar Archaeology Museum. The complex is one of the chief heritage landmarks of the old Peshawar walled city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gor Khatri”. KP directorate of archaeology excavation reports; Peshawar municipal records on the Avitabile period.
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