Places to Visit in Mattannur and Airport

The approach to Mattannur tells you what kind of country this is. Coming up from Thalassery on State Highway 30 — the road that eventually climbs to Coorg — the coconut-and-backwater flatness of the coast gives way within twenty kilometres to red laterite cuttings, rubber, areca and small, stubborn rectangles of paddy wedged into every level patch. The municipality is bounded by the Irikkur river to the north and the Anjarakandy river to the south, which makes Mattannur a watershed town rather than a riverfront one: the water is always nearby and never quite in the middle of things. Wikipedia’s figure for the town’s average annual rainfall is 3,438 mm, which is high even by Kerala’s standards, and it shows in how green the place is in September and how dust-red it goes by April.

The town itself grew where the Mahadeva temple stands, and the Malayalam Wikipedia article on Mattannur says so plainly — the settlement took shape with the temple as its centre. What is remarkable is how little that has been eroded. A photograph taken from the road in front of the temple still shows an unbroken green paddy field running right up to the compound wall, with the tiled roof of the shrine and the parked cars of worshippers on the far side of it. For a town with an international airport at the end of a five-kilometre road, keeping a working rice field at the front door of your principal temple is not nothing.

The airport was a long time coming. The foundation stone was laid on 17 December 2010 by the then Chief Minister, V. S. Achuthanandan. An Indian Air Force aircraft made a trial landing on 29 February 2016 — an event the airport’s own Wikipedia article records was criticised at the time as an election stunt, since the air traffic control tower was incomplete and technical assistance had to be borrowed from Calicut. Commercial operations finally began on 9 December 2018, when Air India Express flight IX 715 left for Abu Dhabi at 10:13 IST. The airport is a public–private company, Kannur International Airport Limited (KIAL), in which the Government of Kerala holds about 32.9 per cent, state and central public-sector undertakings about 22.5 per cent and the Airports Authority of India about 9.4 per cent, with the Chief Minister of Kerala as board chairman.

What the airport is *for* is written into KIAL’s own description of itself: it was developed “primarily to cater to the travelling needs of the large NRI population in the region who travel frequently to various international destinations”. North Malabar has been sending workers to the Gulf for two generations, and before 2018 a family from Mattannur flew from Kozhikode or Mangaluru. The route map reflects that history exactly. Air India Express, which uses Kannur as a hub, flies to Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dammam, Doha, Dubai, Jeddah, Kuwait City, Muscat, Ras Al Khaimah, Riyadh and Sharjah, alongside Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram; IndiGo, which treats it as a focus city, adds Fujairah plus Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Mumbai and more. It is an airport built for people going to work, and it feels like one.

It is also an airport with a real, unresolved constraint, and any honest account of Mattannur has to say so. Kannur has never been granted “point of call” status in India’s air services agreements, which means foreign carriers cannot run regularly scheduled services here. The Kerala government has asked repeatedly — the Chief Minister has raised it with the Prime Minister and with the civil aviation minister, and a parliamentary standing committee has recommended it — and the Union government’s position has been that non-metro points are not being granted as new points of call, and that Indian carriers should serve them instead. Several international airlines have been reported as interested. None can come until that changes.

The land the runway sits on has a cost attached to it that is easy to miss from the departure hall. Roughly 1,200 acres were acquired in the first phase by August 2010; a third phase at Velliyamparamba was still incomplete years later; and the Phase I runway extension has required a further tranche — reported in March 2025 as around 245 acres of private land, a process then some eight years old and affecting in the region of 200 families, with a special compensation package under discussion. The published runway is 3,050 metres by 45 metres, designated 07/25, with Category I approach lighting at the 25 end and simple approach lighting at the 07 end. Extension proposals have been floated at 3,400 metres and at 4,000 metres, and the difference between those numbers is what the argument has been about.

Away from all this, Mattannur is a working small town with a decent civic spine. The panchayat was constituted in 1962 out of the villages of Pazhassi, Kolari and Porora, and became a municipality on 1 April 1990; it now runs to 36 wards. Literacy at the 2011 census was 94.8 per cent, and the sex ratio was 1,078 women per 1,000 men. The population was 63.2 per cent Hindu and 35.9 per cent Muslim, which is roughly the Malabar average and is legible in the skyline. There is a KINFRA industrial park at Velliyampara, and the education list is longer than the town’s size suggests: Pazhassi Raja NSS College, a Government Polytechnic, a college of teacher education, and St Thomas College of Engineering and Technology at Sivapuram, some eight kilometres out.

For a traveller, the honest framing is this: almost nobody sets out for Mattannur. People land here. But the five kilometres between the terminal and the town are worth spending an hour on if you have a long layover or an early departure, because within them you can stand in front of a temple that has kept its rice field, walk around a memorial building the municipality opened on the anniversary of a king’s death, and look east at Puralimala, the ridge that gave the Kottayam rajas their other title. That is a better use of a spare morning than the airport lounge, and it is entirely doable on the KSRTC bus that runs between the town and the terminal in about fifteen minutes.

Legend & myth

Start with the name, because Mattannur’s deepest piece of lore is the word itself and it comes in three competing versions. The one the Malayalam Wikipedia gives first is theological: മൃഡൻ (*Mridan*) is an epithet of Shiva, and Mridannur — Shiva’s place — is said to have worn down over centuries into Mattannur. A second reading is purely topographic, deriving the name from *Mottakunnu*, the bald knoll, which is a very plausible description of the laterite domes this town is built over. A third points at old revenue survey records and a form written *Pattinikad*. None of the three can be proved, and it is worth noticing that they belong to three different worlds — a god, a hill, and a colonial land register. A north Kerala town will often carry all three at once.

The Shiva reading has the temple to back it. Mattannur Mahadeva Temple stands at the town’s centre, and its presiding deity is not Shiva in any of the usual martial or ascetic forms but Shiva in the *Dakshinamurti sankalpam* — the god facing south as the silent teacher, expounding by stillness rather than speech. That is a comparatively uncommon choice for a principal prathishta in Kerala, where Dakshinamurti more often occupies a subsidiary niche. The subsidiary deities here are Mahavishnu, Ganapathi, Ayyappan, Bhoothathan and the naga daivangal, the serpent gods, with a separate Vishnu shrine and an Ayyappan kavu attached. Devotional sources further claim that the installation was performed by Parashurama and that the temple belongs to Kerala’s 108 Shiva temples; both are traditional attributions carried by temple listings rather than anything documented, and this record repeats them as claims, not as history.

The town’s festival calendar turns on that temple. The annual utsavam falls in the Malayalam month of Kumbham, running Kumbham 15 to Kumbham 22 — seven days that in 2026 correspond to 27 February to 6 March — and closes with the arattu. The two events that define it are *thidambu nritham* and the pulling of the theru. Thidambu nritham is a ritual dance of the North Malabar and Kasaragod temples, reckoned to be over six hundred years old, in which a single performer balances the thidambu — the decorated processional image of the deity — on his head and dances to the drums in a pleated skirt, silk vest and the turban called an ushnipeetam. It is a form you will not see in south Kerala at all, and Mattannur is squarely inside its country.

A devotional listing says elephants do not take part in the Mattannur festival and that processions use the ratha or theru instead. Official Devaswom and Kerala Tourism pages do not state that rule, while at least one commercial district listing describes caparisoned elephants. Because the sources conflict, ask the temple about the current procession format and value the chariot tradition on its own terms.

Mattannur is also, unmistakably, theyyam country, and it has its own kolams rather than a borrowed share of somebody else’s. On the night of 1–2 November 2025 a photographer working for a Wikimedia folklore project recorded Marana Gulikan and Karingulikan at a shrine barely a kilometre north-west of the town centre — the black-dotted face, the crescent on the brow, the vast palm-leaf headdress, the ring of villagers holding up phones. Gulikan is the kolam of death, understood as a form of Yama, and he is one of the more feared and more consoling figures in the North Malabar pantheon precisely because he is the one you can argue with. That is Mattannur’s own theyyam, in Mattannur, and it is what this record points at.

It is worth refusing something here explicitly. The single most famous piece of North Malabar folk religion is the Muthappan cycle — the child found on a bed of flowers at Ayyankara Illam, the toddy pots, the arrow that fell at a bend of the Valapattanam — and Muthappan is worshipped near Mattannur too, including at the Puralimala madappura. That story is not Mattannur’s, and it is told in full on our Parassinikadavu page, where it belongs. Note also, if you go looking, that the Puralimala Muthappan madappura’s own signboard gives its postal address as Mel Muringodi, P.O. Peravoor — the shrine sits on the ridge, not inside the municipality.

The ridge itself is the last of Mattannur’s myths and the biggest. Puralimala rises on the eastern horizon across about 15 square kilometres of the Maloor, Thillenkeri, Peravoor and Muzhakkunnu panchayats, standing somewhere between 1,800 and 3,000 feet. Local tradition holds that when Hanuman was carrying the Sanjeevani mountain of healing herbs north, a handful of its soil fell here — which is offered as the explanation for the unusual density of medicinal plants on the slopes, and is exactly the kind of legend that encodes a real botanical observation. The hill also carries Harishchandrakotta, a fort site associated in local memory with the campaigns of Tipu Sultan’s period and with guerrilla use afterwards, and a Shiva lingam on the summit ground.

One absence should be recorded honestly, because absences are claims too. We searched in Malayalam — മട്ടന്നൂർ ക്ഷേത്രം, ഐതിഹ്യം, ഉത്സവം, കാവ്, തെയ്യം, കളിയാട്ടം — as well as in English, and read the Malayalam Wikipedia articles on the town, on the Mahadeva temple and on Puralimala. The temple’s Malayalam article has carried an incompleteness tag since September 2015 and its ഐതിഹ്യം section is simply empty: there is no published origin legend for the Mattannur shrine that we could find in either language. That is a gap in the record, not evidence that the town has no story. And there is, unsurprisingly, no folklore attached to the airport land — a laterite plateau levelled in the 2010s does not have any yet.