Discover Bangladesh: Kantaji Temple
If you have not seen the Kantaji temple of Dinajpur, you have not seen how artistic the late-medieval community Bengal had been.
The temple lies 287 kilometres northwest of Dhaka. To show you around the temple on video, we embarked on a journey by bus from Kalyanpur early this month.
After a six hour journey, we reached Dinajpur at 1 pm. Dinajpur is a serene and sleepy town where people take everything easy and without any hurry. We hired a three wheeler named Tomtom to go to our destination.
Kantanagar Temple is commonly known as Kantaji or Kantajew Temple at Kantanagar. This Hindu temple is one of the most magnificent religious edifices belonging to the 18th century.
The temple belongs to the popular Hindu Kanta or Krishna and this is most popular with the Radha-Krishna cult in Bengal.
This beautiful temple is dedicated to Krishna and his wife Rukmini. Built by Maharaja Pran Nath, its construction started in 1704 CE and ended during the reign of his son Maharaja Ramnath in 1722 CE.
It boasts one of the greatest examples on terracotta architecture in Bangladesh and once had nine spires, but all were destroyed in an earthquake that took place in 1897. So naturally this was a place of interest to us.
There is around 15000 terracotta works installed on the walls of the temple.
Along with Kantajew you can also visit Archana Temple, Dinajpur Palace, Ramsagar, Mata Sagar in Dinajpur.