Lime removal at Kanchi Varadarajar Temple

The famous Varadaraja Perumal temple in Kanchipuram is known for its intricately carved 100 pillar mandap. Due to ignorance, it was white washed for ages and the pillars now have thick coats of white wash mostly at the bottom half of the pillars and the mandap’s periphery. A philanthropist, native of Kanchi,is now a famous patent lawyer having office at almost all the cities in India, had vowed back to get his beloved deity’s temple back to its glory and he had selected REACH for the cleaning of this pillar mandap, the kitchen (filled with black carbon soot, again settled on the walls for ages). So we had started the work last week and have put the best ASI trained workers and one full time supervisor for this task. First phase comprises of the mandap work, later after few months we’ll be cleaning the whole kitchen (madapalli for Thaligai) to remove all the soot and carbon using scientific methods.See the pictures here..

 

The thickly lime coated 100 pillar hall at Varadaraja Perumal temple is being cleaned and the lime spoiling the beauty of the sculptures are already removed in the first stage of the project. Now the top stones which are dismantled are removed, worn out lime weather coarse are scrapped and would be re-coated with fresh water proof lime.