Krishna temples
Every Krishna temple in the directory, grouped by state.
A guide is written where we have one, and the temple is named where we do not. Bookable pujas appear where we have verified pandits in the temple's city.
Braj is not one temple but a landscape, and it is walked rather than visited. Mathura holds the prison cell of the birth; Gokul and Nandgaon the childhood; Vrindavan the flute and the raas, with Banke Bihari its busiest shrine; Barsana is Radha's; and Govardhan is circled barefoot over twenty-one kilometres.
The great Krishna temples outside Braj each hold a different form. Dwarka in Gujarat is Krishna as king. Nathdwara in Rajasthan holds Shrinathji, the seven-year-old lifting Govardhan, and its image is dressed and changed eight times a day. Udupi in Karnataka is seen only through a carved window, the Kanakana Kindi, and Guruvayur in Kerala admits Hindus only.
Jagannath at Puri is worshipped as a form of Krishna, though the image belongs to no other tradition's iconography — unpainted wood, replaced every twelve to nineteen years in the Nabakalebara, with the old images buried in the temple grounds.
Vrindavan's temple population has grown rather than shrunk. The older shrines — Banke Bihari, Radha Raman, Govind Dev — sit among a much larger number built in the last century, and ISKCON's Krishna Balaram Mandir, opened in 1975, is among the busiest. Janmashtami and the Braj Holi at Barsana and Nandgaon are the two occasions when the town's population multiplies and the lanes are closed to everything but foot traffic.
Kurukshetra sits apart from all of it. The field where the Gita was spoken is marked by a tank and a tree rather than a great temple, and the observance there is on Gita Jayanti in Margashirsha — a recitation of the seven hundred verses rather than a darshan.
Temple collections
Krishna
