Mylapore
Mylapore ( Tamil : மயிலாப்பூர் Mayilāppūr [ majilaːpːuːr ]), formerly Mailapur, Meliapor shortly Mylae ( மயிலை Mayilai [ majilɛi̯ ]), also Thirumylai ( திருமயிலை Tirumayilai [ ˌt̪iɾɯmajilɛi̯ ]), a district of is Chennai (Madras), the capital of India State of Tamil Nadu . Mylapore is one of the oldest districts in Chennai and has a history that goes back far into ancient times. The Kapaliswarar Temple and St. Thomas Basilica are located in the district .
Position and extent
Mylapore is in the south of Chennai. The boundaries of the district are not precisely defined, but Mylapore can be demarcated from the districts of Triplicane in the north, Royapettah in the northwest, Teynampet in the west and Adyar in the south. In the east lies the coast of the Bay of Bengal with the city beach Marina Beach . In the south, the mouth of the Adyar River marks the border to the district of the same name.
Administratively, there is no district called Mylapore, the area rather belongs to the Teynampet zone. But there is a constituency Mylapore ( Mylapore constituency ) in the election for the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly (the parliament of the state). This includes the districts ( wards ) 121 to 126.
history
The history of Mylapore goes back much further than the Chennais, which was only founded as a British colony in the 17th century. Mylapore, located at the mouth of the Adyar, seems to have been an important port since ancient times. Sometimes it is identified with the port city of Manarpha or Maliarpha mentioned in the 2nd century in the Geographia of the Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy . From the 6th to 9th centuries, the Pallava kings ruled from Kanchipuram over the northern part of what is now Tamil Nadu. During this time, Mylapore served as the port of the Pallava Empire. The Pallava ruler Nandivarman III. (844–866) is mentioned with the nickname Mayilaikavalan ("protector of Mylapore"). The Kapaliswarar temple of Mylapore is sung about in the devotional hymns of the poet Sambandar as early as the 7th century . The temple in its present form is not more than 300–400 years old.
According to legend, Mylapore is said to have been the hometown of the poet saint Tiruvalluvar , the author of the Tirukkural , which is highly respected among the Tamils . The Christian tradition, however reported that the Apostle Thomas after the death of Jesus had moved to India. After evangelizing the Thomas Christians on the Malabar Coast , he is said to have come to Mylapore and settled in a cave on Little Mount . He was martyred around the year 72 on the nearby St. Thomas Mount and was then buried in Mylapore. Most of his relics are said to have been transferred to Edessa later , but his original burial place was still venerated in India. A Nestorian colony appears to have existed early in Mylapore . Persian and Arabic accounts mention Mylapore as Betumah ( Aramaic for "House of Thomas") in the 9th century . The Christian community is also mentioned by Marco Polo in 1293 , also later in the travelogues of Odorich von Portenau and Niccolo di Conti , who reports of over 1000 Nestorians in the city. The Nestorian congregation seems to have disbanded: According to the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa , the church was already in ruins in the early 16th century.
In the early 16th century, the Portuguese , who had begun colonizing the Coromandel Coast, gained a foothold in Mylapore. 1522–23 they built a church on the site of the tomb of St. Thomas and founded the colony of São Tomé de Meliapore . In 1545 there were already 600–700 Portuguese colonists. 1548/59 to let Jesuits settled in Mylapore. From 1606 Mylapore was the seat of the diocese of São Tomé de Meliapore , in 1614 the city was fortified. With an interruption between 1662 and 1687, when the Mylapore was held alternately by the Sultanate of Golkonda , France and the Netherlands , the city remained under Portuguese rule until 1749. Meanwhile, the British had risen from Fort St. George, founded in 1639 in Madras, just five kilometers to the north, to become the largest colonial power in southern India. In 1749 Mylapore came into the possession of the British East India Company . The expansion of Madras during the British colonial era made Mylapore a district of Madras that was renamed Chennai in 1996.
Attractions
Two of the most important sacred buildings in Chennai are located in Mylapore: the Kapaliswarar Temple and the St. Thomas Basilica . The Kapaliswarar temple is dedicated to the god Shiva in his form as Kapaliswarar (Kapalishwara). The roughly 85 × 90 meter large rectangular temple complex with its 37 meter high gopuram (gate tower) in the east and a smaller western gopuram with lavish figurines can be considered a typical example of the South Indian Dravida style . To the west of the temple is a large temple pond. Among several temple festivals that are celebrated every year, the most important is the ten-day festival in March / April, during which the images of the gods are drawn around the temple in a large procession in a temple carriage.
The St. Thomas Basilica is located on the site of the alleged burial place of the Apostle Thomas. Today's neo-Gothic church was built in 1893 during the British colonial period on the site of a previous building built by the Portuguese in the 16th century. The St. Thomas Basilica is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Madras Mylapore . In 1956 it was raised to the rank of minor basilica . A second Catholic church in Mylapore is the Luz Church in the west of the district. Built in 1516 by the Portuguese, this small baroque building is the oldest church in Chennais.
There is a Hindu temple dedicated to him at the alleged birthplace of the poet saint Tiruvalluavar. There is also a center of the Hindu reform movement Ramakrishna Mission with a "universal temple" in Mylapore .
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Mylapore is connected to the rest of Chennais by numerous city bus routes. In addition, not far from the Kapaliswarar temple is the Thirumylai train station of the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS).
literature
- Lakshmi Vishwanathan: Kapaliswara Temple. The Sacred Site of Mylapore. Chennai 2006.
- Ines G. Županov: A Reliquary Town: São Tomé de Melipor: The Political and the Sacred in Portuguese India . In: Missionary Tropici: The Catholic Frontier in India (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries) . University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor 2005, 87-110.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ List of neighborhoods on the Chennai (Tamil) city website. (PDF file; 410 kB)
- ^ KA Nilakantha Sastri: The Illustrated History of South India. From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 285.
Coordinates: 13 ° 2 ′ N , 80 ° 16 ′ E