Place · hilltop Shiva temple · India
Shankaracharya hill, Srinagar
Also known as Shankaracharya Temple, Jyeshtheshwara, Takht-i-Sulaiman, Gopadri
A stone temple on a circular plinth at the top of the hill above Dal Lake, reached by a long stair, which Kalhana's chronicle knows as Jyeshtheshwara and which later tradition attached to Adi Shankara's visit to Kashmir. The present structure is early medieval on an older base.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.080, 74.850
Worth knowing
The hill has been called Takht-i-Sulaiman, Gopadri and Jyeshtheshwara in turn, and the temple carries a Persian inscription alongside the Sanskrit associations — four names and three languages on one outcrop. From the plinth the whole valley, the Dal and the Hari Parbat fort are laid out at once, which is why every ruler has marked it.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueMārtānd Sun Temple
The Shankaracharya temple on the hill above Srinagar and the Martand sun temple on its plateau are the two surviving statements of Kashmir's stone architecture at either scale: a single cella on a circular plinth commanding the whole valley, and a colonnaded peristyle court with a trefoil arch that has no parallel anywhere else in India. Kalhana knows both.
- Site withinSrinagar
The Shankaracharya hill stands at the southeastern edge of Srinagar above Dal Lake, with its stone temple on a circular plinth at the summit. Kalhana's twelfth-century Rajatarangini calls the hill Jyeshtheshwara and attaches a Shaiva lineage to it that long predates its later association with Adi Shankara, so the shrine is one of the oldest surviving monuments in the Srinagar landscape.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Shankaracharya Temple”. Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī, trans. Stein, on Jyeshtheshwara; Archaeological Survey of India, Srinagar circle records.
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