Ekamra Kshetra in Bhubaneswar Keeps Temples From the 7th to the 15th Century, Led by the Lingaraja, and Has Been on India's UNESCO Tentative List Since 2014

The old town of Bhubaneswar keeps a run of sandstone temples that India’s dossier for UNESCO describes as virtually a complete record of Kalinga architecture, from its beginning to its high point at the Lingaraja. The dossier, submitted on 15 April 2014 and published on UNESCO’s Tentative List as entry 5916, counts 199 historic structures in the area called Ekamra Kshetra. Of these, 23 are protected by the central government and 11 by the state.

Documentation sheets posted by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), most of which name the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as the protecting body, date the earliest surviving temples there to the first decade of the 7th century. The Orissa Review, a Government of Odisha magazine, said in 2007 that the local temple-building tradition ran for nearly a thousand years without a break, from the 6th or 7th century to the 15th or 16th. The caves of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, about six miles north-west of the temple town, have their own article. This one stays with the temples.

A holy area measured in miles

The dossier draws on the Ekamra Purana, a 13th-century Sanskrit text, for the size of the sacred ground. The text describes a kshetra, a holy area, a panchakrosa or about 10 miles around. The Khandagiri hills bound it on the west, the Kundalesvara temple on the east, the Balhadevi temple on the north and the Bahirangesvara temple near Dhauli on the south, with the Lingaraja at the centre. An inner circle runs from the Meghesvara temple in the east to the Sundaresvara temple in the south.

According to the dossier, Ekamra Kshetra had 45 villages and was divided into eight sacred precincts, each with its own water body, temples, small shrines and set processional routes tied to the Lingaraja. The old town, it adds, faced the Bindusagar tank beside the temple and followed the mandala, a square-and-circle diagram of the cosmos. The dossier calls the result an example of Hindu city planning.

Older layers lie in the same ground. The dossier lists the extensive ruins of Sisupalgarh and the evidence of an ancient wall on the Dhauli hillock. The Ashokan rock edicts at Dhauli, which the dossier also cites, are covered in the article on Ashoka.

A mango grove with one great temple

The dossier translates Ekamra Kshetra loosely as the area adorned with mango trees. It and the Odisha Review for May 2018 both say that the presiding deity of the Lingaraja is believed to have stood originally under a mango tree, which gave the area its name. The dossier quotes the Anantavasudeva inscription of Paramarddi, which it says describes Ekamra as a sacred area “adorned with hundreds of mango-groves, wherein exists a single Devakula [temple] surrounded by numerous temples.”

The dossier says the “Temple City” label comes from the 700 temples that once stood here. The US/ICOMOS paper by the landscape architect Nupur Prothi Khanna, presented in 2018, gives over 500 temples across the wider area, citing a government website. The two counts come from different authors and may not describe the same boundary.

The temples are still in use. The dossier points to the sevayats, the hereditary servitors who run the daily rituals, and to the settlements they keep around the temples. It also names Ekamra Kshetra as one of five great religious centres of Odisha since early medieval days.

The temples, in the order they were built

The IGNCA documentation sheets give most of the dates. The Svarnajalesvara temple, which that sheet lists as protected by Orissa State Archaeology, goes to the first decade of the 7th century under the Sailodbhava dynasty and is described as just earlier than the Parasuramesvara. The Parasuramesvara sheet gives the first half of the 7th century and cites three sets of inscriptions of varying dates. It adds that the Public Works Department repaired the temple thoroughly in 1903.

Scholars have argued over the Parasuramesvara. Puratattva records that R. D. Banerji read the inscription on the slab of planets over the sanctum door as no earlier than the 8th century, while K. C. Panigrahi compared its letters with a copper-plate grant of the Sailodbhava king Madhavaraja II and placed it in the 7th. Panigrahi’s 1961 survey assigned the temple to 600 to 650 CE. James Fergusson, writing in 1876, had chosen it as the earliest and given about 500 CE.

The Vaitala, a temple of the goddess Chamunda with a barrel-vaulted roof, belongs to the 8th century in its sheet. The Muktesvara goes to the 10th century under the Somavamsi dynasty. The Odisha Review for May 2018 narrows that to 950 to 975 CE, and the World History Encyclopedia gives the 9th to 10th century. The sheet for the Rajarani places it at the end of the 10th century or the start of the 11th. The Ministry of Tourism says 11th century, and the encyclopedia says 11th to 12th.

Mark Cartwright’s encyclopedia entry dates the Brahmesvara to about 1061 CE and says it helps date the Lingaraja on stylistic grounds. It places the Meghesvara in the last quarter of the 12th century. The Ananta Vasudeva has three dates: the dossier says 1178, the encyclopedia says 1275, and the Ministry of Tourism says the 13th century. The dossier adds that recent evidence extends the building period on both ends, with the latest temples reaching the 15th or 16th century.

Dibishada Garnayak, writing in the Orissa Review in November 2007, sorts this run into four phases. The formative phase goes from the 6th century to the first half of the 9th, under the Sailodbhavas and the early Bhaumakaras. The transitional phase follows to the first quarter of the 11th, and the mature phase runs from the middle of the 11th century to the 13th, with the Rajarani, Brahmesvara and Lingaraja as its series. The last phase, which he calls decadence, falls under the Gajapati kings of the 14th to 16th centuries and is marked by plainer walls and laterite in place of sandstone. He puts the Jagannath temple at Puri and the Konark Sun Temple in the Ganga period, which he describes as the climax.

How an Odishan temple is put together

The Orissa Review article says the Odishan temple is a regional branch of the Nagara style of northern India, and that Bhubaneswar served as its experimental ground without being shaken by changes of ruling dynasty. The temples are therefore tied to the land of Kalinga and not to a royal house. The dossier names Odisha’s own building manuals, among them the Bhubanapradipa, Silpa Prakasa and Silpa Ratnakosha, and says traditional Odia architects still use many of their terms.

The local terms name three types. A rekha deul is a sanctum under a curving tower that reads as one unbroken line. A pidha deul is a porch with a pyramid roof of receding steps. A khakhara deul has a barrel-vaulted roof, shaped like an upturned boat or a pumpkin gourd, and the Orissa Review says it is generally used for shrines of the goddess. A typical temple joins a rekha sanctum, called the deul, to a pidha porch, called the jagamohana. The dossier says the sanctum is the smaller of the two, since it is for a glimpse of the deity, while the porch holds the congregation. Fully developed temples add a dance hall (natamandira) and a hall of offerings (bhogamandapa) on the same axis.

The builders used sandstone, and the dossier says the Khandagiri and Udayagiri hills were the nearest quarry. The stones were dressed and fitted without mortar, which the sheets call ashlar dry masonry. The Muktesvara sheet adds that its roofs use the corbelled technique, in which each course of stone projects past the one below. The Parasuramesvara sheet records laterite for its foundation and compound walls. For the sculpture, the Orissa Review quotes the art historian Stella Kramrisch: “Architecture in Orissa is but sculpture on a gigantic scale.”

The sheet for the Muktesvara gives its size as 13.68 by 8.10 metres on plan and 10.67 metres high, and notes that Fergusson called it a gem of Odishan architecture. The sheet for the Parasuramesvara gives 12.80 metres, the Vaitala 11.58 and the Rajarani 17.98.

The Lingaraja, and four heights for one tower

Odisha Tourism calls the Lingaraja the finest expression of Kalinga architecture and dates it to the 11th century. It is dedicated to Shiva as Harihara, which joins Shaiva and Vaishnava worship, and Odisha Tourism says devotees hold the lingam to be swayambhu, self-manifested. The Ministry of Tourism says the sanctum lingam is believed to measure 8 feet across and rise 8 inches, and that a laterite boundary wall around 22,720 square metres encloses about 150 smaller shrines. The festivals it names include Mahashivaratri, Ashokashtami and the Chandan Yatra, and Odisha Tourism adds the Rukuna Ratha Jatra.

The World History Encyclopedia says the temple was first called Tribhuvanesvara, Lord of the Three Worlds, and that its four connected halls each carry their own ceiling on four pillars. The dossier quotes Fergusson, the 19th-century architectural historian, calling the Lingaraja “one of the finest examples of purely Hindu temple in India.”

Sources disagree on who built it. The Odisha Review for 2018 says the temple was probably built by Somavamsi rulers as a Shaiva shrine and remodelled after the Gangas arrived, which is how Harihara worship came in. Garnayak’s 2007 article puts it at the end of a series of Somavamsi-period temples. The World History Encyclopedia says about 1100 CE in the reign of the Ganga kings.

The tower’s height varies even more. The dossier says 128 feet (about 39 metres), the encyclopedia 45 metres (about 148 feet), the Odisha Review for 2018 about 150 feet, and Odisha Tourism and the Ministry of Tourism nearly 180 feet (about 55 metres). None of the pages says how the tower was measured.

For visitors, Odisha Tourism’s page, checked on 5 November 2026, gives hours of 5 am to 9 pm with a break from 12:30 to 3:30 pm and no entry fee. It states that only Hindus are admitted to the temple and that a viewing platform outside the complex has been built for others. The Ministry of Tourism’s page gives the same entry rule.

The tank that came first

Bindusagar, beside the Lingaraja, measures 450 by 175 metres, according to the US/ICOMOS paper. The paper dates the tank to the 7th or 8th century and says it is believed to predate the temple, though it notes accounts that the temple may have been conceived in the 7th century too. The Lingaraja, it says, follows the location and orientation of the tank, as do other tanks and temples nearby, and the tank’s footprint is nearly double that of the temple complex. A community of priests keeps seats around Bindusagar for ancestral rites through the year.

The temples are tied together by processions. Puratattva cites Rajendralala Mitra’s 1875 survey for Parasuramashtami, held on the eighth day of the waxing moon in Ashadha (June or July). On that day the movable image of Lingaraja, Chandrashekhara, goes to the Parasuramesvara temple and is received with flowers, incense, music and dance. The Muktesvara sheet records Sivaratri and Kartikapurnima observed there.

Two centuries of reading the temples

Puratattva’s bibliography begins in 1815, when Colonel Mackenzie sent draftsmen to draw the temples of Bhubaneswar, Puri, Jajpur and Konark. Markham Kittoe toured the province in 1838 and, like other European visitors, was refused entry to the Lingaraja, so his account of it is short. Fergusson’s 1848 Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindostan carries a lithograph of the temple, and his 1876 history, which Puratattva calls the first systematic overview of Odishan temples, set out a chronology. Rajendralala Mitra, whose Antiquities of Orissa appeared in 1875 and 1880, was allowed inside the temple precincts.

A visit in 1898 by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir John Woodburn, led to repairs between 1898 and 1903 on four temples: the Brahmesvara, Rajarani, Muktesvara and Parasuramesvara. M. H. Arnott’s report on the work appeared in 1903. The ASI published Debala Mitra’s guide to the town in 1958, and Panigrahi’s 1961 Archaeological Remains at Bhubaneswar, which Puratattva calls the first full-scale study of the town, set out a chronology from inscriptions, religion and style. T. E. Donaldson’s three-volume Hindu Temple Art of Orissa followed in 1985 with 4,500 illustrations, and K. S. Behera published a monograph on the Lingaraja in 2008.

Where the nomination and the work stand

UNESCO’s page, read on 5 November 2026, still lists Ekamra Kshetra as a Tentative List entry, under criteria (i), (ii) and (iii). The dossier sets the area beside Angkor Wat, Hampi and the Great Living Chola Temples, and argues that those are largely archaeological sites, whereas Ekamra Kshetra is a living city with continuing traditions. The comparison is the dossier’s own argument, and UNESCO publishes tentative lists without commenting on their content.

On the ground, the state’s Ekamra project, the Ekamra Kshetra Amenities and Monument Revival Action Plan, was conceived in 2019 and had its foundation stone laid in June 2023, according to OdishaBytes. On 15 February 2026 the state Law and Works Minister said an interpretation centre and a statue of Shiva would be added, and that Bindu Sagar would be redeveloped as a heritage lake. The Hans India reported that the plan includes desilting the tank with hydrodynamic cavitation and bioremediation and linking Devipadahara, Papanasini, Godabari and Kotitirtha to it. The minister said the executing agency had been disengaged and a revised plan with more money was being drawn up. On 31 October 2026 UNI reported that he had directed officials to finish the ongoing works at Ekamra Kshetra by January 2027.