Kalyani - Forgotten city

Basavakalyan

We started a day before to Bidar, Karnataka . My very trusted darling didn’t give me any trouble, she just turned sweet 16.



We headed to the once capital city of chalukyas kingdom. We were welcomed by the kids playing cricket in front of the fort. I got to accept that every possible vacant place would be converted to cricket ground, but isn’t this 12th century fort a preserved monuments by ASI



We managed to drive between the crickets pitch and kids to reach the gate of fort. It was locked and we couldn’t even find an information counter. As I could not find any small shops selling hot chais and snacks, nor rickshaw wallas waiting to pouch the tourist I realized this place is not visited frequently. After much try to find a way to get inside the fort I realized that it’s rather not visited by tourist at all.



We were trying to act smart we tried to get help of local kids playing around there. Kids demanded 200 Rs to show us around the fort, isn’t this surprising , there’s no official counter to get you inside but the local kids can take you around the place for 200 bucks. We just walked around the fort then realized that only the front portion of the fort spots the mughal architecture looks whereas the fort is strongly built by the chalukyas. You could still spot the statues of god and other celebrated figures.

After walking around the fort we decided to head to narayana pura where once a big ancient temple stood. We headed though the gravel roads for quite some time before reaching the proper roads which leads to narayanapura village. The broken roads didn’t give us any surprise as we were expecting much worse.

As we started to pass to village walls, we had a slight doubt that if these are walls of once magnificent temple. The place was so backward that you would really doubt if the people would have ever seen the IT capital (banglore) of the state. We finally managed to reach the entrance of the Monument after lot of struggle driving though narrow village lanes.



We asked few people if really that was the temple which we were looking into as this didn’t spot features of what we imagined. Most of temples built during those times were built to show mighty power of their kingdom. This one was just one block. We walked few steps away then we realized that it’s rather broken and damaged to such an extended that you cannot put them to a definite shape.

The remaining pieces of destroyed temple lay in pathetic form. Most of the sections of the temple have been converted to houses. There are number of family living under roof of depleted temples. Few of remaining areas which could be recognized were still worshipped.

We just took few minutes break to console our self as our expectation were more, we started taking few clips of local kids over there that were obviously happy to pose. We later started focusing on the sculptured and way there were made. Even though they lie amidst the dust over for 1000 years they still had the grace in them. One could easily feel the laborious work of those sculptures. Various sculptures belonging to Shiva, Shakti, and sons could be found there.




After spending some and when we were bored of taking snaps we decided to move to bidar to check other local places.