Place · Syrian Christian church · India
Niranam St Mary's, Pathanamthitta
Also known as Niranam St Mary's, Pathanamthitta, St Thomas' Niranam
The 1-century Niranam St Mary's Orthodox Syrian Church at Niranam in Pathanamthitta district, Kerala — one of the seven-and-a-half churches (Ezhara Palli) that Saint Thomas is said to have founded in Kerala in 52 CE in the apostolic tradition of the Thomas Christians. The Niranam site is identified by the Malankara tradition as one of the primary Thomas-founded Christian communities on the central Kerala coast. The current church structure is 17-century Portuguese rebuild on much older foundations; the 1876 Mar Dionysius chapel addition expanded the complex. The church remains the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church's second-highest-ranking parish after Kottayam Pazhaya Seminary. The annual Niranam Palli Perunal festival each February-March draws over 50,000 pilgrims. The adjacent Niranam heritage museum preserves the parish's archive dating to the 16-century.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 9.250, 76.550
Connections (1)
- Companion in the same setKokkamangalam Mar Thoma, Alappuzha
Kokkamangalam on the Vembanad water and Niranam on the Pamba are the backwater and river churches of the seven, and the set's shape follows the waterways rather than any road, because the waterways were how Kerala moved goods and people until the twentieth century. Niranam also produced the Niranam poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who wrote some of the earliest surviving Malayalam verse, so the church tradition and the language's literature begin in the same handful of small towns.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pathanamthitta”. Kerala church records; Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (1989).
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