10 Interesting Facts About Varanasi

🕉10 Interesting Facts About Varanasi🕉

Varanasi has been known at various times in history as Benares or Kashi, “City of Light”.

Varanasi is one of the most sacred cities in the world today.

It is a crumbling maze of a city that rises from the ghats (steps) on the western banks of the Ganges.

Varanasi is named after the confluence of two rivers, Varuna and Asi.

Varanasi is seen by devotees, as the holiest of Indian pilgrimages, home of Shiva, where the devout come to wash away their sins.

It is also one of the holiest tirthas (literally a “crossing” or sacred place where mortals can cross over to the divine, or the gods and goddesses come to bathe on earth), where many return to die in the hope that they may achieve moksha, the salvation of the soul from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Mark Twain famously described Varanasi as “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together”.

Varanasi is centered on the ghats that line the waterfront, each honoring Shiva in the form of a linga—the rounded phalliclike shaft of stone found on every ghat.

Pilgrims come to the Varanasi ghats lining the River Ganges to wash away a lifetime of sins in the sacred waters or to cremate their loved ones.

Varanasi is the quintessential India – colourful, chaotic, dirty, overwhelming, and yet magical

🕉 Varanasi is one of the most blindingly colourful, unrelentingly chaotic and unapologetically indiscreet places on earth. Varanasi is a highly congested maze of narrow alleys winding behind its waterfront ghats, at once highly sacred yet physically often far from clean. As an image, an idea and a symbol of Hinduism’s central realities, the city draws pilgrims from around the world, to worship, to meditate, and above all to bathe. It is a place to be born and a place to die. In the cold mists of a winter’s dawn, you can see life and death laid bare. For an outside observer it can be an uncomfortable, albeit unmissable experience, juxtaposing the inner philosophical mysteries of Hinduism with the practical complications of living literally and metaphorically on the edge.

Here the most intimate rituals of life and death take place in public and the sights, sounds and smells in and around the ghats – not to mention the almost constant attention from touts – can be overwhelming. Getting lost in the impossibly cramped labyrinth, you are crowded by pilgrims purchasing flowers for puja (offering or prayer), grieving relatives bearing corpses, chanting priests sounding gongs, and sacred cows rooting in the rubbish – an experience you will never forget.

Har Har Mahadev Shambhu Kashi Vishwanath Gange 🙏🙌🙏🙌🙏