In English

The City of a Thousand Spires

To walk through the old quarter of Bhubaneswar is to walk through time itself. Here, above the tanks and the tamarind trees, rise the curving sandstone towers of temples raised across more than a thousand years — so many that the city has long been called the Temple City of India. Legend holds that seven hundred shrines once stood clustered around a single sacred tank, and though the centuries have thinned their number, several hundred survive still, their weathered stone glowing amber in the evening light. The very name of the city comes from Tribhubaneswara, the Lord of the Three Worlds — a form of Shiva — and to this day Bhubaneswar wears its ancient sanctity like a quiet crown.

Ekamra Kshetra: The Sacred Ground

In the old texts this holy landscape is called Ekamra Kshetra, the field of the single mango tree, its sanctity described in the thirteenth-century Ekamra Purana. At its heart stands the great Lingaraj Temple, and around it the sacred geography unfolds in careful order — a ring of shrines and holy tanks laid out, it is said, according to the ancient principles of the mandala, with the vast Bindusagar tank believed to hold water from every sacred river of India. For over two thousand years, from the age of Ashoka to the medieval kings, pilgrims have come to bathe in these waters and worship among these spires. Today the whole ensemble stands on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage sites, honoured as one of the most complete sacred townscapes in the country.

A Living Museum of Kalinga Art

Nowhere else can the story of Kalinga temple architecture be read so completely as in Bhubaneswar, where the style is preserved almost from its birth to its full flowering. The delicate seventh-century Parasurameswar temple shows the tradition in its youth; the exquisitely carved Mukteswar, with its famous stone archway, marks its graceful maturity; the poetic Rajarani, adorned with sensuous sculpture, reveals its confidence; and the towering Lingaraj crowns its culmination. To move among them is to watch an art form grow across the centuries — the towers rising ever higher, the carving ever richer — a living museum written not in words but in stone.

Lingaraj: The Sovereign Temple

At the centre of it all rises the Lingaraj, the greatest of Bhubaneswar’s temples and among the finest expressions of the Kalinga style anywhere. Built chiefly by the kings of the Somavamsi dynasty around the eleventh century, with later additions by the Ganga rulers, its central tower soars to some fifty-five metres above the sanctum. The deity here is Harihara, a union of Shiva and Vishnu, worshipped as Tribhubaneswara. Unlike so many ancient temples that have fallen silent, the Lingaraj remains fiercely alive — its rituals unbroken, its courtyards thronged with devotees, its great tower a fixed point on the city’s skyline and in the devotion of its people.

The Deeper Past: Sisupalgarh and Dhauli

Yet Bhubaneswar’s story reaches back far beyond its temples. On the city’s edge lie the ramparts of Sisupalgarh, one of the largest and best-preserved early fortified cities in all of India, which flourished as a capital of ancient Kalinga more than two thousand years ago. Its wide planned roads, grand gateways and guard-houses speak of a sophisticated urban civilization that thrived here centuries before the first temple rose. A little further stand the rock edicts of Dhauli, where the emperor Ashoka, sickened by the carnage of the Kalinga War, turned from conquest to compassion — a moment of conscience carved into stone that changed the course of Indian history.

A City Reborn

For all its antiquity, the Bhubaneswar of today is also a strikingly modern creation. In 1946 the German architect Otto Königsberger drew up a masterplan for a new capital, laying out one of independent India’s first planned cities alongside Jamshedpur and Chandigarh, organised around the idea of self-contained neighbourhood units strung along a central spine. Two years later the capital of Odisha was shifted here from Cuttack, and the sleepy temple town began its transformation into a modern administrative and cultural centre — a rare place where an ancient sacred city and a planned modern one occupy the same ground.

Where Ages Meet

Today Bhubaneswar forms a thriving twin city with neighbouring Cuttack and has grown into a hub of learning, technology and industry, its new avenues busy with the life of a young, ambitious India. And yet, turn a corner in the old town and the centuries fall away — the sandstone towers still rise above the tanks, the temple bells still ring at dusk, and the Lord of the Three Worlds still holds court at the city’s heart. In Bhubaneswar the ancient and the new do not so much collide as embrace, each giving the other meaning, and together they make it one of the most remarkable cities in India — a place where every stone remembers, and every spire still points to the sky.