Sonepur

Sonepur, or Suvarnapura, stands where the Tel meets the Mahanadi in western Odisha. Its temples made it a celebrated sacred town: the poet Gangadhara Mishra described it in 1664 as a second Varanasi. Older copperplate grants already referred to its shrines under the Somavamshi rulers, and the temples later built under the Chauhans honoured Shiva, Vishnu and the goddess.

Sonepur came into the orbit of the Chauhan rulers of western Odisha, and in the seventeenth century became the seat of a separate kingdom under Madan Gopal Deva. Among its celebrated shrines is the Suvarnameru temple, beside the Tel near its confluence with the Mahanadi. Scholars differ over which seventeenth-century ruler built the surviving temple, but the worship of its deity is associated with the older sacred history of the town.