00:00Worshipped for a thousand years, almost nothing in it is ancient.
00:04One tower goes back to the 1200s.
00:07It watched everything else come down.
00:10Sacked once, burned once, and it came back bigger both times.
00:15By the end of this, you'll know why.
00:18Fourteen towers stand over this temple, the tallest nine tiers and 52 meters,
00:24carved and painted top to bottom, not one patch of bare stone.
00:28A Tamil saint wrote hymns about this place in the 7th century.
00:33It was already old when he found it.
00:36The temple's own text says the goddess here was born out of fire,
00:40a fire her father lit, asking for a son.
00:44Inside is a hall everyone calls the Thousand Pillar Hall.
00:49Somebody counted, 985.
00:53So how much of what you're looking at is actually old?
00:57To answer that, you have to go back to the 14th century,
01:01to an argument over who should sit on the Pandya throne.
01:05One claimant asked Delhi for help.
01:07Delhi sent an army.
01:09In 1310, forces of the Delhi Sultanate under a commander named Malik Kafur reached the city.
01:17The city was sacked.
01:18Trade stopped.
01:20Public worship stopped.
01:22And the temple was stripped of what it held.
01:25What stood there afterward was ruin.
01:28But the ground under it never stopped being sacred.
01:32So what exactly got rebuilt?
01:35Recovery came from the Vijayanagara Empire.
01:38Their rulers restored the core.
01:40They reopened the temple to worship.
01:43Then the Nayak kings took over.
01:46Vishwanatha Nayak rebuilt the complex.
01:48He fortified it.
01:49His minister supervised the work.
01:52That hall, the one 15 pillars short, it went up in 1569,
01:58two and a half centuries after the sack.
02:01The real transformation came later.
02:04Tirumala Nayaka ruled from 1623 to 1659.
02:10He expanded the place to the scale you see.
02:13Towers, halls, shrines inside shrines.
02:17Notice the pattern.
02:19Nobody put it back the way it was.
02:21Every rebuild made it larger.
02:25So count it up.
02:26Almost nothing standing here is ancient.
02:29Most of what you walk past is about 450 years old.
02:34Almost nothing.
02:36Not everything.
02:37The Eastern Tower, raised between 1216 and 1238,
02:43already a century old when the army arrived.
02:46Still standing.
02:48Which raises a harder question.
02:50Painted stucco does not last 400 years.
02:54Not in this heat.
02:55Not through these monsoons.
02:57Something has been keeping it.
03:00The paint doesn't survive on its own.
03:03It gets redone.
03:04All of it.
03:05The towers.
03:06The tens of thousands of figures.
03:09The whole painted surface.
03:10And not whenever it looks tired.
03:13On a schedule.
03:14Roughly every 12 years.
03:1712 years.
03:19Scaffolding goes up the towers.
03:21The figures are repaired and repainted.
03:24Then the ceremony that closes the work.
03:26The last one was in 2009.
03:30Then February 2018.
03:33Night.
03:34Fire in a hall on the eastern side.
03:37A hall standing since the 15th century.
03:40Shops burned.
03:42Stone pillars cracked.
03:43In places the roof came down from the heat.
03:477,000 square feet of it.
03:49Nobody was hurt.
03:52The sculptures in the pillared hall were saved.
03:54But the repair needed 79 new pillars cut from black granite.
03:59Fifteen feet each.
04:01And the clock kept running.
04:0312 years came and went.
04:05The ceremony didn't.
04:07Which is the strange part.
04:09Nobody schedules maintenance on a monument.
04:12You repair a monument when it breaks.
04:14So why is this one on a clock?
04:18Because, finally, it isn't maintenance.
04:22The ceremony has a name.
04:25Kumbabi Shechem.
04:26And what it renews isn't the paint.
04:29It's the consecration.
04:31The rite is what makes the stone a temple.
04:34And it is meant to be renewed.
04:37So the tradition never expected the building to last.
04:41It expected to remake it.
04:441310 forced that early.
04:462018 forced it again.
04:49The building was never the permanent thing.
04:52The cycle is.
04:54That wedding at the center of the legend,
04:56a whole city restages it every year.
04:59Watch that one next.
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