01A crore lingas
The katha of the place: Ravana won from Mahadev a linga of great power, and in his haste let it fall here. To teach him care, the linga became a crore of lingas, all alike. Ravana could not tell which was the first, took one and went away, and the true linga stayed on this shore. So the place is Koteshwar, or Koti-lingeshwar. The Kutch tradition adds that Koteshwar is the Bhairava of Hinglaj Mata, whose cave is across the sea in Baluchistan, and that the pilgrimage to her is not complete until one has come here. Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim of the 7th century, wrote of a Mahesh temple at a port near the mouth of the Indus where ash-smeared ascetics lived.
02The walls of 1820
The temples stand inside a battlemented wall on the mound, the sea washing the western face; three flights of steps lead to the gate. An inscription on the left of the gate records that the fort and temples were built in Samvat 1877, 1820 CE, by two merchants, Sundarji and Jetha Shivji. In the middle of the court a stone Mahadev temple rises from a high platform. Under the central dome of its porch sits a large brass Nandi given by Rao Deshalji of Kutch, with Hanuman and Ganpati under the side domes. In the hall floor the builders set a marble tablet with their own names, so that the feet of worshippers would pass over them.
The life of this place
- 1820 (Samvat 1877)Sundarji and Jetha Shivji build the present fort and temples.
Koteshwar is about 150 km west of Bhuj, a few kilometres from Narayan Sarovar; the two are visited together. Watch the sunset over the creek from the temple wall.
