The temple
The temple of Jagannath, "lord of the world", stands on a slight rise in the town, inside two walled enclosures. Its tower, about sixty-five metres high, is in the Kalinga style of Odisha, with a curved shikhara, and the complex contains an audience hall, a dance hall and a hall for offerings, as well as more than a hundred smaller shrines. The temple kitchen, said to be one of the largest in the world, cooks the food offered to the deities, which is then distributed as mahaprasad.
The main temple was begun by Anantavarman Chodaganga, the Eastern Ganga king who ruled from Kalinga to the Ganges delta in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and completed under his successors. Anangabhima III, in the thirteenth century, declared Jagannath the true sovereign of the kingdom and himself the god's deputy, an idea that later Gajapati kings of Odisha also adopted.
The images
The three main images are carved from wood and are unlike any other temple images in India: stylised figures with large round eyes and stumps for arms. Jagannath is dark, Balabhadra white and Subhadra yellow. Their origin has been much debated, and scholars have suggested roots in tribal cults of the region absorbed into Vaishnava worship. Jagannath is identified with Krishna and with Vishnu.
At intervals of twelve to nineteen years, in a year with a double month of Ashadha, the images are replaced in the Nabakalebara ritual. Trees chosen by signs revealed in dreams are felled, new images are carved in secret, and an essence called the brahma padartha is transferred from the old images to the new. The last renewal was in 2015.
The chariot festival
Each year the images are brought out of the temple and taken in procession to the Gundicha temple about three kilometres away, on three huge wooden chariots pulled by crowds of devotees. Before the chariots move, the titular king of Puri sweeps their platforms with a golden broom, a ritual of royal service to the god. European accounts of devotees dying beneath the chariots gave English the word juggernaut.
Pilgrimage and its history
Puri is one of the four dhamas, the seats of pilgrimage at the four corners of India, and the Govardhana matha here is one of the four monasteries traditionally founded by Shankara. The Bengali saint Chaitanya first came to Puri in 1510 and, after journeys to the south and to Vrindavan, lived there from about 1516 until his death in 1533, and his devotion to Jagannath made the town a centre of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.
The temple was attacked in the sixteenth century, an event attributed in Odia tradition to Kalapahar, a general of the Bengal sultans, and the images were hidden. Under the Marathas and then the British, who took Odisha in 1803, the temple's administration was a matter of state concern, and the British collected a pilgrim tax until the 1840s. Only Hindus may enter. In 2024 the temple's treasury, the Ratna Bhandar, was opened for an inventory for the first time in decades.
Further reading
- Eck, Diana L. India: A Sacred Geography. Harmony Books, 2012
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. University of Chicago Press, 1966
See also
- Eastern Ganga dynasty — The Eastern Gangas ruled Kalinga for nearly a thousand years, and under them the Jagannātha temple at Puri and the sun temple at Konark were built — the two monuments that define the religious landscape of Odisha.
- Krishna — Krishna is a central deity of Hinduism, worshipped as the eighth avatar of Vishnu and, in many traditions, as the supreme god in his own right, whose life is narrated primarily across the Mahabharata, the Harivamsa, and the Bhagavata Purana.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.