The story
How Giriraj
came to us
Scroll down the path and watch the dot travel all the way from bare land to the new temple.
The beginning
Not with a fence
When we first bought the land, we longed to begin building the ashram with something more inspiring than a fence or a transformer shed. But a temple on bare land is no simple matter: there is no electricity, no water, no one to guard it. We prayed for a way forward — and the Lord answered in a most unusual way.
The call
“There are guests on our land”
One day a friend of ours who lives at Govardhan phoned us in Moscow: “There are guests on our land.” What were we to think? Nothing good: when “guests” turn up on an empty plot, they usually come for a bribe or with threats. But our friend said, “Don’t worry, I’ll send you a photo.”
The guests
One large shila and a hundred small ones
It was a large Govardhan shila, and with it about a hundred smaller ones. They had been carefully set down by the roadside next to our land, and the local villagers had already begun to worship them, tying on ribbons and applying tilaka. “Yesterday there was nothing here. Today we came, and there they were.”
Hitchhiking
Giriraj came on His own
Most likely someone digging a foundation had unearthed the shilas: Govardhan is slowly sinking into the earth. Govardhan shilas cannot be thrown away like ordinary stones, so they were being taken back to Govardhan — and then perhaps the cart tipped over. We like to think that Giriraj simply wanted to come to us and, true to tradition, made the journey by “hitchhiking.” We moved Him to the center of the plot and performed a puja, and a local boy none of us knew carefully applied tilaka to the largest Giriraj.
Weight
400 kilograms
Our Giriraj weighs about 400 kg, so He can only be moved by crane or tractor.
The first temple
Four posts and a tin roof
The first building on the land was Giriraj’s temple. The architecture was hardly original — four metal posts and a tin roof — but the festivals held there were the real thing.
The new temple
Every detail thought through
We spent a long time designing the new temple, working out every detail, and along the way we tested the techniques that will be used to build the large temple of Sri Sri Radha-Govinda.
