Konark Sun Temple

The Konark Sun Temple is a thirteenth-century Hindu temple to the sun god Surya, standing near the Bay of Bengal about 35 kilometres north-east of Puri in Odisha, eastern India. It is ascribed to Narasimhadeva I, a ruler of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, and is usually dated to around 1250. Conceived as Surya's colossal stone chariot, with carved wheels and horses, it is regarded as the high point of the Kalinga style of temple architecture, though its great tower has long since fallen.

Konark, called Kainapara in some texts, was already a trading port in the early centuries of the common era, and evidence suggests that a sun temple stood in the area by at least the ninth century. Several Puranas mention a centre of sun worship at Mundira, which may be an older name for Konark. The thirteenth-century builders worked beside an earlier Surya temple and moved its sanctuary image into the new one. The smaller shrine later called the Mayadevi Temple, uncovered in 1909, is now thought to be an older sun temple of the late eleventh century absorbed into the complex.

Narasimhadeva I, who reigned from 1238 to 1264, paid for the temple, and its construction was supervised by Shiva Samantaraya Mahapatra. Unusually for a Hindu temple, palm-leaf records in Sanskrit describing its planning and building survived and were found in a village in the 1960s. The complex comprised a main sanctuary, the deul, an assembly hall, the jagamohana, a dance hall and a dining hall. Twenty-four carved stone wheels, nearly four metres across, and a team of seven horses turn the whole into Surya's chariot; the wheels are often linked to the months and fortnights of the Hindu calendar. The tower over the sanctuary is estimated to have reached 225 to 229 feet, roughly 70 metres, and the surviving jagamohana stands about 39 metres high.

The walls are covered with carving: musicians on the terraces, gods of the Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakta traditions of Hinduism, animals, scenes of everyday life, military processions and, on the upper levels, erotic couples. Some writers have connected these last with tantric practice, but local texts do not support this, and they may simply be the kama and mithuna scenes found on many Hindu temples. Excavations in the 1950s found a Vaishnava shrine and a kitchen, showing that the complex served more than one tradition.

How the temple came to ruin remains uncertain. The old idea that it was never finished is contradicted by inscriptions, including a copper plate of 1384 that implies active worship. The Ain-i-Akbari, compiled at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century, describes a prosperous temple that astonished visitors. The Muslim general Kalapahar is believed to have attacked it, most often dated to around 1568. Explanations for the collapse range from deliberate destruction during raids between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries to natural causes; the historian Thomas Donaldson places the damage between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when some worship apparently continued. By 1676 European sailors knew the dark ruin as the "Black Pagoda", a landmark for ships.

In the eighteenth century, when the Maratha Empire ruled Odisha, a Maratha holy man came upon the temple, deserted and overgrown. In the last quarter of that century its pillar dedicated to Aruna, Surya's charioteer, was moved to Puri and set up at the Lion's Gate of the Jagannath Temple, where it still stands.

Under British rule, requests for conservation in 1803 and 1838 led only to bans on removing stone and on vandalism. The Raja of Khurda took stones and sculptures for a temple in Puri, and what remained of the main tower collapsed in the 1830s or 1840s, with sources giving both 1837 and 1848. Sculptures went to the Indian Museum in Calcutta and to the British Museum, until objections from local Hindus led the government to halt further removals. In 1903 the lieutenant governor of Bengal, J. A. Bourdillon, had the jagamohana sealed and packed with sand to stop it collapsing, and trees were planted in 1906 as a windbreak against sand from the sea.

UNESCO inscribed the temple as a World Heritage Site in 1984. Hindu pilgrims still gather there each year for the Chandrabhaga Mela. In September 2022 the Archaeological Survey of India began removing the sand from the jagamohana, a project planned to take three years and to include internal steel supports.