Mediaeval Temples of the Dakhan c14.11

c14.11

There is, however, another site, and a much more likely one, for the city of Purī, and that is in the middle of Sālsette island (See the accompanying sketch map). The island is literally sea-girt, but at the same time the north and north-east sides are not so far separated from the mainland as to have made it difficult for the Śilāhāras to have transported their troops one way or the other. This site, about a mile north of Marol village, is bounded by the Sālsette hills on the north, by a long ridge, in which are the Kondivte caves, on the west, a stream on the east, and Marol village on the south. It is now filled with low rice fields between irregular areas of rocky waste ground, covered to a great extent with cocoanut palms and brush-wood jungle. Upon some of these latter spaces are vestiges of former Hindu temples of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The site has, however, been almost wiped clean by the Portuguese, who found, in the ruins of the old temples, abundant material with which to erect their numerous churches and convents, which themselves, in turn, are now in ruins or have disappeared altogether. Near the centre of the site, on the west side of an old tank, around which are indications of old buildings, a trial excavation revealed the buried foundations of two old buildings of considerable size, one having been supported on pillars set in groups of four. A few hundred yards to the east is the Sarpala tank, on the east side of which are a few sculptured fragments and mutilated images of a Hindu temple; and, in the wall across the outflow, at the south end, are built several more fragments. On the south of these two tanks are some seven or eight sites, with the remains of foundations cropping up, and there is another, with a much-corroded boundary stone, upon the hill to the east of these. Other ruins are of the Portuguese period.