What to expect
Highlights
- Temple visit at Thrikkariyoor Temple
- Kerala temple architecture and rituals
- Local food, shops and pilgrim services nearby
The story
Everyone driving east from Kochi to the Thattekkad bird sanctuary passes Kothamangalam, and almost nobody stops. A few kilometres off that road, on a riverbank, is a Shiva temple that devotional tradition counts as the very last of the 108 Shivalayas consecrated by Parasurama — the end of the list, not an entry in the middle — and that local historical tradition holds to have been a seat of Chera power. It is a small temple with two very large claims, and they sit at quite different levels of evidence.
The story of Thrikkariyoor Temple
Physically it is unassuming: a compact Kerala temple by the water, with the usual arrangement of sanctum, prakaram and outer wall, and none of the scale of Ernakulam's marquee shrines. There is no interpretation panel, no guide and no shop. If you arrive without knowing what you are looking at, it will read as an ordinary village temple, which is exactly what most people driving past assume it is.
The relationship with the river is the reason the temple is where it is. Kerala temples of this age are sited on water for practical and ritual reasons alike — the arattu, the concluding procession of the annual festival, ends at the river — and walking down to the bank is a more useful five minutes here than another circuit of the prakaram.
Its rhythm is the standard Kerala one: an early opening for the morning poojas, a long closure across the middle of the day, and an evening reopening until the night pooja. That midday closure is the thing that catches out day visitors coming from Kochi, who tend to arrive at exactly the wrong hour after a slow drive through Perumbavoor.
The best way to use it is as a first stop rather than a destination. Thrikkariyoor, Bhoothathankettu and the Thattekkad bird sanctuary lie along the same road east, and a morning that begins here and ends at the water or the forest is a far better-shaped day than one that treats the temple as an afterthought on the way home.
Legend & myth
The 108 Shivalayas belong to the Parasurama cycle, the founding myth of Kerala itself. Parasurama, the axe-wielding sixth avatar of Vishnu, is said to have won the land from the sea: granted a boon by Varuna, he threw his axe from Gokarna and was given all the ground it flew over, as far as Kanyakumari. The land he raised he gave to Brahmins, and across it he is said to have consecrated 108 temples to Shiva.
Thrikkariyoor's particular claim within that cycle is that it was the last of the 108 — the final consecration, closing the sequence. Devotees hold it as such and it is the temple's principal devotional distinction.
This is myth and we present it as myth. The Parasurama story is a foundation narrative rather than a chronicle, and the 108 lists vary between sources. What it tells you truthfully is how this temple has been ranked in Kerala's religious imagination for a very long time, which is its own kind of fact.
The temple also sits at the centre of a second story that is not about gods at all. A strong local belief in Kothamangalam holds that the festival at the Marthoman Cheriyapally — the Jacobite Syrian church in the town — does not commence until the para and the lantern from Thrikkariyoor temple have reached the church. The para is the traditional Kerala grain measure, a wooden vessel heaped with rice and decorated, long used as a temple offering; the lantern is exactly what it sounds like. A Hindu temple sends a measure of grain and a light across town, and a Syrian Christian feast waits for them before it begins. Nobody designed it as a gesture of harmony. It is simply how the town's year has been ordered for long enough that people state it as a fact rather than an achievement.
There is a third story, and it is the biggest one in this part of Ernakulam — but it is almost always told somewhere else. The bhoothams, the spirits or demons of Malayalam tradition, are said to have set out to dam the river overnight in order to flood the country upstream and submerge a Shiva temple. That temple is this one. Shiva broke them with a trick rather than a fight: he counterfeited the dawn, a cock crowed, and the bhoothams abandoned the half-built dam and fled the coming light. The boulders they dropped are still in the riverbed at Bhoothathankettu, whose name means the demons' dam, and the legend is told at the barrage, at Paniyeli Poru and along the whole rock-strewn reach. It is rarely told here, at the building it is actually about. Thrikkariyoor is the reason the story has a plot.
Notice one thing about it while you are standing here, because it is the kind of detail that tells you what a legend is made of. Bhoothathankettu is on the Periyar. This temple stands on the northern bank of the Kothayar, a tributary of the Muvattupuzha — a different river system, roughly eight kilometres away across the divide. Damming the Periyar would not, on any straightforward reading of the ground, put water over Thrikkariyoor. That is not a defect in the story. It is the signature of a story that is remembering a flood rather than describing an engineering scheme: the water came, the temple was threatened, and the account of why was assembled afterwards out of the most dramatic feature in the landscape, which is a field of enormous boulders in a riverbed. The documented candidate for that flood is the great Periyar deluge dated to 1341.
Read the full history of Thrikkariyoor Temple 811 more words
History
The second claim is historical rather than mythological, and it is genuinely argued: that Thrikkariyoor was a centre of the ancient Chera power, and by some accounts the capital of one of the Cheraman Perumals, the rulers of old Kerala. Eastern Ernakulam, on the route between the coast and the Ghat passes, is plausible ground for such a seat.
The evidence, though, is traditional and circumstantial rather than settled scholarship. We present it as a claim that is seriously made and not conclusively established, which is the honest position — and a more interesting one than either accepting it flatly or dismissing it.
The temple keeps an annual utsavam in the Malayalam month of Meenam, roughly March to April, on the familiar Kerala pattern: flag-hoisting, daily processions across several days, and a concluding arattu at the river. That is when the place is at its fullest and its most worth seeing.
The older records give the place other names — Karuvoor, Karaorai — and it is on those that the Chera argument largely rests, along with the river running past the temple towards the village of Karur in Kothamangalam. Kerala scholars including Prof. Joseph Mundassery and V. Kanakasabhai have been cited in support of the identification with an early Chera headquarters, and local accounts describe Brahmin settlement in this area from an early date and a decline following a Pandya attack around the eighth or ninth centuries.
The church at the other end of the para-and-lantern custom has its own dates. Marthoman Cheriyapally, Kothamangalam, is a Malankara Jacobite Syrian Orthodox church believed to have been established in 1455 by eighteen families, and it holds the tomb of Mar Baselios Yeldo. Its principal feast, the Kanni 20 Perunnal, falls at the start of October. The deity here is Thrikkariyurappan, and Maha Shivaratri is a principal observance alongside the Meenam utsavam.
The abandonment is the part of the history that explains the building. Accounts of the Pandyan attack hold that the population fled to neighbouring places and that Kothamangalam and its surroundings were left uninhabited for two centuries across the eighth and ninth centuries. That is the reason a site with claims this large has so little visible antiquity standing on it: whatever was here was left, and what you walk through now is the temple that came back afterwards and has been maintained since. It is a pattern that recurs across Kerala — the institution is old, the fabric is not, and the two get quietly conflated on signboards.
The temple is bigger than it first reads and rewards a slow circuit. The compound runs to about four acres. It faces east and carries towers on both the eastern and western sides. The sreekovil — the sanctum — is unusually a large rectangle rather than the square or circular plan most Kerala shrines use, and it rises in two floors under copper. In front of it stand the anakkottil, the elephant mandapam, and the balikkal mandapam, whose wooden carvings show the Ashtadikpalakas, the guardians of the eight directions, together with Brahma. The flagmast is teak sheathed in copper. There are southern and northern doorways with rest areas for devotees, a thidappalli in the south-west of the nalambalam where the naivedyam is cooked, and a large pond in front.
The murals are worth looking for rather than assuming. The sanctum carries frescoes and wooden sculpture, and the mural paintings were restored in 2013 — recent enough that what you see is in good condition and old enough that it is not a novelty. Photography is not permitted in the sanctum, so this is a thing to look at rather than to collect.
One geographical correction while we are here. This temple stands on the northern bank of the Kothayar, a tributary of the Muvattupuzha river, not on the Periyar. Bhoothathankettu, the Thattekkad sanctuary and Paniyeli Poru are all Periyar sites. Thrikkariyoor is the point on an eastern-Ernakulam day out where you leave one river system for another, which is easy to miss when everything is described simply as being on the way to Thattekkad.
Why visit
It is the oldest thing on the Thattekkad road, and it is a twenty-minute detour from a drive most visitors already make.
Standing in what tradition calls the last of Parasurama's 108 Shivalayas is a different feeling from standing in a temple that is merely on the list.
The Chera capital claim is a real, unresolved historical argument, which makes the site more interesting than a settled answer would.
It is a working village temple with no visitor apparatus, which is increasingly rare on a route with any traffic at all.
The riverside setting is quiet and the Meenam festival, ending with arattu at the water, is a proper local occasion.
It pairs naturally with Bhoothathankettu and the Thattekkad bird sanctuary into a single eastern day out of Kochi.
