Photograph of Bhaktapur Durbar Square

CAIR-Nepal

HeritageGraph

Nepal's temples, festivals and the people who keep them — written down, connected, and traceable to a source.

A temple is never just a temple

It stands on land held by a guthi that has maintained it for generations. It wakes for a festival whose date is set by the lunar calendar. The deity inside it is worshipped, under another name, at a shrine on the far side of the valley.

HeritageGraph writes those connections down. Every one of them says where it came from and who checked it, so anyone can follow it, question it, or build on it.

An animated diagram of the seven Kathmandu Valley monument zones connected to one another. The same seven zones are listed as links below.

Move your cursor across the picture. Every place here opens its own page.

How it works

Three steps, every time

  1. Someone records it

    A festival date, a shrine, the guthi that holds the land.

  2. Someone checks it

    A reviewer reads the source and puts their name to it.

  3. It joins the graph

    Linked to everything it touches, and open to follow.

How the record is built

Inscribed 1979

Seven places, one World Heritage Site

In 1979 UNESCO added all seven of these places to the World Heritage List together, as a single site. Each one is a part of it — not seven separate sites.

Photograph of Changu Narayan
07

Changu Narayan

Traditional Newar settlement and Hindu temple complex, with one of the earliest inscriptions in the Valley, from the fifth century AD.

Open in the Heritage Museum

Where to go from here

Photograph of Lumbini, the Birthplace of the Lord Buddha

Also on the World Heritage List

Lumbini, the Birthplace of the Lord Buddha

The second of Nepal’s two cultural World Heritage Sites, in the plains of the south, where the Buddha was born.

Inscribed 1997

Open in the Heritage Museum

What UNESCO lists, and what else we keep

The World Heritage List is a small part of what HeritageGraph holds. Guthi land trusts, festival calendars, the life of the Kumari, deities worshipped under different names in different places — most of this appears on no international list, and nothing here suggests that it does.

Explore the connectionsSee it on the Atlas
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence.Credits and licences →