Sirpur

Sirpur is one of central India's great buried histories, a quiet village on the Mahanadi that was once Sripura, the flourishing capital of the Dakshina Kosala kingdom. Between roughly the 5th and 8th centuries, under the Sarabhapuriya and Panduvamshi rulers, it was a major religious and commercial centre where Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions thrived side by side, and its soil has yielded one of the richest archaeological sites in the region.

The site's crowning survivor is the Laxman Temple, a 7th-century Vishnu temple built almost entirely of brick, its doorway and tower carved with astonishing intricacy, widely regarded as one of the finest early brick temples in India. Around it, decades of excavation have uncovered the foundations of a lost city: extensive Buddhist monasteries such as the Anand Prabhu Kuti and Swastik Vihara, the stepped Surang Tila temple, Jain remains, and, on the riverbank, the still-worshipped Gandheshwar temple assembled from ancient sculpted fragments. Tradition holds that the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through Sripura in the 7th century, a measure of its stature in its day.

MyTripMyTravel treats Sirpur as a considered, scholarly detour for guests drawn to deep history rather than crowds. We read the temple and the excavated viharas with a guide who can bring the vanished city to life, take in the riverbank shrines and the site museum, and slot Sirpur into a wider Chhattisgarh journey from Raipur toward Bastar.