Turuvekere - 01

After Kolar, I am gearing up to cover the Tumkur district. Having traveled to Kunnigal and Sira taluk, I browsed through the map to find my next location and was surprised to find almost 10-12 Hoysala temples in this quite taluk of Tumkur, called Turuvekere.

Traveling with a purpose, with an intention to know different people, their culture, the history of the place, the present and the help they may need has always been my style of traveling. So in a way this trip opened my eyes to some truth, some realizations and some ruins that we can otherwise support.

Turuvekere was once called 'Dhenupuri'-(a city of cows) and was once an “Agrahara' or ‘Rent-Free Village' granted to scholarly Brahmins in the 13th century A.D.

My wife P, Cousin N and I left on this expedition early on a Sunday morning (Jan 2nd), on my i10. We took the Hassan route till Yediyur and then a right deviation to Turuvekere. This is the best route and coming via Tumkur may end up longer. As soon as we arrived at the town, I stopped by a sugarcane juice vendor in order to convert the list of temples I had researched into a driving destination with routes and directions. He was extremely helpful and not just told us the route but also gave the order of visit we should follow which turned out to be very helpful.

Our first stop was Channakeshavatemple. Passing through Narrow Streets, standing alone is Channakeshava temple built in 13th century in usual star shaped foundation. The priest arrived in no time and opened the temple for us. He performed pooja and archane. The priest has worked as a chemist in cement commissioning industry before. When he resigned the job to fly to gulf, the war broke out there and – “I remained back here.” He said. “Finally you have the profession that your ancestors have been committed to, I followed their step.” He added gracefully. He also expressed the fact that there was no much funding to the temple and his father and he had cleaned it themselves. Many villagers have other new temples that take all the attention. Since they did not want to leave the idol un-attended, they perform pooja every day. He also guided us to other temples in the vicinity.

Turuvekere city has three more temples of this time to see in walk able distance from one another.

Moole Shankareshwara is a beautiful temple which was excavated by archeology department few years back to notice the star shaped foundation typical in Hoysala architecture. Some of the rocks carry the signature from the main architect – Jakana achari.

Temple- Gangadhareshwara was unfortunately closed so we could only view the architecture and sculptures from the outside. A sculpture on Bedara Kannapa and a huge bell made of rock is an attraction here along with a huge Nandi.

Another famous temple around the corner is Lakshmi Beteraya Temple- a Vishnu temple seems to be very famous and with better funding than others. It was built by built by Mahadandanayaka Somanna.

We next drove to Nonavinakere which is a left deviation on the way to Tiptur (around 6-10 kms away from Turuvekere). A quite village houses two more temples - Sri.Venugopala Temple & Sri.Beteraya Temple, both Vishnu temples, popular among iyengars. While the first remained closed with a window open to view the God, second was opened by a very old priest for public view. He was very old and was finding it hard to walk around which also brings to light the losing interest in the traditional professions among younger generation.



Continued Here Turuvekere-02