Two consecutive earthquakes shattered the glorious historic centre of Patan in 2015. It took seven years and hundreds of devoted craftsmen and women to restore it to its original mission: to connect people.

Rohit Ranjitkar is the director of the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT). He thinks the earthquake also had a positive impact. “Many people did not value the heritage around them. When the temples collapsed, they suddenly had no place to worship. Hundreds of people came out to collect and protect the remnants of temples. The earthquake brought intangible and tangible heritage together”

The disaster brought social coherence and helped to recruit a band of craftsmen. “In a week, we had two hundred people to train,” says Rohit. “We created a ‘royal workshop’ where they learned new skills”

The courtyard of Patan Museum was packed with struts, columns, and other precious carvings rescued from the rubble. Putting them together seemed like an impossible puzzle. But Rohit and his team began collecting photos to find out where all the jigsaw pieces belonged.

Woodcarvers

Until recently, wood was abundant, and Newar craftsmen excelled in this medium. The carvings on door and window panels, arched toranas, end beams, columns, and capitals are all significant in their iconography and show the carver’s artistic inventiveness. Temple struts offer divine protection and provide instructions like ‘Who abandons his dharma is bitten by hornets’.

Shiva Chauguthi learned how to make furniture as a boy. Working on the scaffolding erected around the temples was challenging, joining vast timber pieces according to precise measurements. It took months to find timber of the correct size. “When I was first recruited, I wondered, how can I do this?”

Indra Kaji Shilpakar started sanding wood when he was ten. Two years later, he began carving, using tools traditionally made by the Khami (blacksmith caste). He, too, wondered how the damage could be repaired. Indra Kaji makes drawings for his relatives to roughly carve a strut or door panel. He is familiar with traditional iconography and often refers to images of deities drawn by his grandfather. When he has no model to work from, he must reimagine a god’s carving by studying similar surviving carvings .of other gods. “There are so many questions to solve—how many arms, what the deity holds”.

The earthquake brought intangible and tangible heritage together

Then, Indra or his son does the final intricate carving. When it is time to install the finished piece, they know in which direction to install it. For instance, in a Shiva temple, Ganesh always faces south.

Indra Prasad has a master’s degree in fine arts, specialising in sculpture. “When we fulfil private orders, we can earn more. But we like the restoration work, feeling proud because the public can see what we do”.

The designs for the whole range of carvings – struts, columns, doors and windows – are all documented on Indra Prasad’s mobile phone. It is labour-intensive work. An ornamental arched piece above a portal (a torana) may take five months to carve. His ancestors spent less effort on the higher-level woodwork to save time, as the spectators could not see all the details. “A first-floor temple window may have the carving of a god. The floor above may have a lion, and then above that a bird, and then perhaps only a small motif on the top level”.

Stone sculptors

Amar Shakya is an old-style sculptor confronted with change. His children work on computers instead of the hammers and chisels that his father used. It is harder to find suitable stones. Moreover, he must relocate his workshop as his neighbours complain about the noise. But he found much satisfaction working on the square. “It has inspired me”.

He is particularly proud of an image of Mahalakshmi, the eternal companion of Lord Vishnu and a symbol of prosperity and abundance, which he carved to replace a stolen image in the Vishveshwara temple.

Stone carvers and masons Surya Bahadur Ranjitkar descended from a line of stone carvers. Few older buildings in Nepal were made of stone, so knowledge of their repair is limited. In the second story of the Krishna Mandir, he shows the heavy base stones he carved, spending days climbing up and down. “I was scared because the stones were so large and heavy, but I wore a helmet and used a chain pulley”

Metalworkers and repoussé artists Babu Ratna grew up playing amidst the temples on Patan Square. He taught himself the skills held by the Tamrakar (metalworkers) craftsmen in his neighbourhood. He has worked with KVPT for two decades, often pairing with his friend Binod.

Babu Ratna and Binod restored the famous Yoganarendra pillar by reattaching the bronze lotus holding the king’s statue and modifying the iron structure to ensure it would fit more securely to the pillar. “When I work on something old,” says Babu. “I learn how it was assembled and can find a way to improve it”. He dissembled and repaired the parts of the king and his two queens. “It is easier to make something new than to repair the old. It is not very difficult, but it takes patience and time”.

Their ingenuity has provided artistic and practical conservation solutions. Babu Ratna repeatedly emphasises that conservation needs creative minds. “I never thought the square would be rebuilt in my lifetime,” says Binod. “Now I come here with my child and am so proud rebuilding is part of our story. “

Rajendra and Rabindra Shakya learned their skills as children. Rabindra continued his education in university. Giant gods and Buddhas are created here, destined for monasteries worldwide. The brothers’ work involves drawing a design to a metal sheet, setting it in pitch and hammering from the backside (repoussé), then setting it in pitch again and carving details with hundreds of chisels.

Bricklayers

Bishwo Ram Suwal is a master mason who laid bricks, paved stones, and installed heavy base stones in Durbar’s temples. Newar towns were traditionally constructed of timber and brick, and the narrow alleys and squares were predominantly paved with brick. Most unique to Newari building is the use of daci apa brick, an exterior veneer brick that tapers towards the back, with the front face showing almost no mortar. This high-fired deep red brick makes a beautiful smooth wall surface. Behind it is an interior layer of low-fired brick called ma apa, and a core of rubble brick fills in the space between these outer and inner layers.

When Bishwo saw the square after the earthquake, the salvaged bricks carefully stacked in piles around the collapsed temples, he knew that while rebuilding was daunting, it could be done.

Replicating a collapsed temple is easy – you start from scratch – but repairing the walls of a damaged structure – like the Vishveshwara temple – made him anxious, as the whole temple might collapse. In the process, he came up with new ideas, such as initiating a system of interlocking outer and inner bricks to make the walls more resilient in the long term. “We are lucky to have the chance to work on these monuments, as they are our ancestors’ gifts. In working on them, we see their skill”.

Priests

Bandana Jha’s ancestors performed rituals and pujas for the square’s temples for centuries. When the family could no longer provide male priests, she took over the daily chores with her mother-in-law. “Men will continue to carry out rituals such as homa, the fire ritual bringing renewal, but women may take over doing puja. The younger generation of gents are too busy”.

Bandana rises to bathe at four in the morning and then performs the house puja. Next, she goes to various temples in her neighbourhood, worshipping Ganesh, Uma Maheshwar, and Harishankar. Arriving at the southern end of the Patan square, she performs puja in a Krishna temple before arriving at the Harishankara mandir. “I don’t feel hungry”, she says.

God gives me energy”. Widowed in her teens, she lives with her mother-in-law and son. “God is my family”.

Temples are where gods and people meet.

A model of conservation

Rohit is critical of quick rebuilding efforts without research and investigation. “Conserving doesn’t mean you have to build from scratch. We salvaged the stone pieces and re-joined them. In our country, people don’t want to reuse old pieces. And if you use modern materials to repair old pieces, they are not happy either. They don’t consider the importance of saving materials or old things”.

Preserving the square was about saving the architectural heritage and preserving the ongoing worship, rituals, and festivals associated with each edifice. Temples are where gods and people meet

Now that everything is back to normal, in the bays between carved columns, young couples watch TikTok on their mobile phones, old men chat, and schoolgirls sip cups of bubble tea from the Kung Fu Bubble Shop behind the temple. Young children play on stone lions, and students in school uniforms pose on temple steps for class photos. The square is alive and has never been visited and appreciated more.

Two 16-year-old friends from school sit tucked in a secluded bay of the Vishveshwara temple. Prasant is drawing the face of his friend Rijisha. “I used to play here as a child,” he explains. “Now drawing is my hobby”. He shows a detailed pencil drawing of the temple. “I will draw them all”, he adds with a smile.

Char Narayana Temple

The original construction stems from 1563. It is the oldest temple (mandir), honouring Narayan (Vishnu). Built primarily of brick in the ‘pagoda’ style, it has two-tiered roofs supported by carved struts. Twenty forms of Vishnu are depicted on the struts that support the lower roof, while the struts of the upper roof are carved with images of female deities, the consorts of Vishnu.

Harishankara Mandir

This three-tiered temple, built in 1706, collapsed almost entirely in 2015. Rebuilding the temple involved sorting, documenting, and repairing 2,000 parts. The reconstruction, spanning four years and requiring several thousand man-days, succeeded in reusing 90% of recovered materials while improving seismic strength.

Krishna Mandir

This is the most important temple for Hindu pilgrims from Nepal and India who celebrate Krishna’s birth (Krishna Janmashtami). It is a square stone Shikara-style temple with three stories. The term Shikara refers to mountain peaks suggested by the temple’s 16 openair pavilions peaked with 21 gilded pinnacles. The narrative friezes surrounding the ground floor are carved with 55 scenes from the Ramayana and 36 scenes from the Mahabharata on the floor above.

The pillar of Yoganarendra Malla King Yoganarendra Malla erected this eight-meter-high stone pillar in 1700. The metal sculpture on top depicts an elegant king sitting in a lotus with his hands in an Anjali mudra (prayer position). The king is flanked by two diminutive wives who also hold their hands in Anjali mudra. He is symbolically protected by a serpent deity, or naga, and is armed with two swords and a shield.

Bhimsen Mandir

Bhimsen – one of five mythical Pandava heroes from the Maharabhata – is worshipped as the protector of trade and commerce. Bhimsen Mandir, a favourite of local people, is duly resplendent with a top roof clad in brass, brass roof finials on each of the three roofs, a projecting bay window clad in gilded metal, brass bells along the roof eaves, elaborate struts depicting Bhairav, Ganesh and Shiva, and a long metal banner that hangs from a middle finial on the third roof.

About The Authors

Claire Burkert
Claire is a writer who came to Kathmandu more than thirty years ago and covers social and cultural subjects. Her husband was a member of the Austrian group that transformed the Keshav Narayan Chowk in the early nineties into the world-renowned Patan Museum, which exhibits Buddhist and Hindu antiquities.

Thomas Kelly
Thomas is a renowned photographer. He discovered rural Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1980s.

More Info
For three decades, the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT) has worked on Patan’s restoration. For more information on KVPT, and if you wish to donate, please visit: https://kvptnepal.org/