Itgi and Kuknur

After lunch, Advesh and I continued our journey... he spoke about various other historical monuments in Gadag district as I drove on NH63. At Bannikoppa we turned off the highway and took the narrow country road. A short drive and we were at Itgi, I parked the car under a tree opposite Itgi Panchyat Office and walked to the temple which is about 50m away. The temple complex was strewn with stone slabs of various sizes in various stages of work. A full scale restoration activity was in progress.

Carvings at this temple are intricate and detailed.

One should see this temple with their own eyes. This well is completely renovated with new stones. The structure looks nice but the water...

This small structure is a temple, there are totally nine such temples but only two or three have Shiva Lingas in them. Rest all seem to be vandalized.

This is the front yard of an incomplete temple.

We spoke to one of the workers, actually he's skilled at carving out stones. He admitted that what ever they did was just rough work and they could never come close to what artists of the past created. He himself was so appreciative about the hollow carvings with minute details etched into them. It was around 4PM and the group leader was waking up his team members from their siesta, asking them to gt back to work. Most of them were reluctant to open their eyes...

Having covered most of the temple complex, we decided to head towards Kukunur, which is about 8km from Itgi.

This is inside Kukunur temple. Since this is an important pilgrim center of Koppal district, the main temple is renovated with oil paint, distemper, ceramic tiles and steel rails.





We spent about 15 minutes looking around, actually there's not much to see. We headed back towards Lakkundi. I dropped off Advesh there and then drove back towards Dharwad. Overall it was not a trip I really enjoyed ...possibly because of the humid weather of the day.

.........