Solapur in a day | Part 3 | Bhuikot aka Solapur Fort

Bhuikot Fort means a fort that is built on flat land and not on a mountain.In Marathi language Bhui means Land and Kot means Killa or Fort. Thus the name Bhuikot.  Currently this fort is converted into a  garden and is under the ASI departrment, Located very adjacent to Siddeshwar temple pond, this place offers enthralling view. One Gets a good view of this fort in the backdrop from the Siddeshwar temple.

Bhuikot Fort in the backdrop can be seen from
Siddeshwar Temple

The Solapur Fort, also known as the Bhuikot fort is said to have been built during the reign of the Bijapur Sultanate of which Solapur was a part. Emperor Aurangzeb resided on this fort for a year between 1685-86 AD. Between 1795 and 1818 this fort was in the hands of the Maratha rulers. Bajirao Peshwa II lived in the fort.

External wall of the Solapur Fort

There are few very interesting stories about this fort which involves Dowry Theory. It is believed that Burhan Nizam Shah ruled Ahmednagar and Ismail Adilshah was in power in Vijapur , Inorder to strengthen the relationship between two states they decided to marry Adilshah's daughter with Nizam Shah of Burhan. The marriage was performed at this Solapur fort with great pomp.At that point of time(1523) Solapur fort was under the control of Adilshah of Vijapur and he declared that this fort shall be given as a dowry to Nizamshah. But after marriage he refused to give the fort which resulted in a war between the son in law Nizam Shah and his father in law Adilshah. Nizamshah lost the battle and fort remained with Adilshah. ( I am just wondering what happened to the wife of Nizam when her father cheated on her husband)

I think enough of history for the time being, now lets move on to our journey of exploration of this fort.

One of the bastion as seen from outside

Our Journey:

Early morning we finished our visit of Siddeshwar temple and moved out of the temple complex but not before trying our hands on the local sugarcane Juice machine. Travel me aise chote chote majje zaroor lene chaiye. Washing down two glasses of the sugar cane juice and listening to olden melodies blaring from the antique transistor was another highlight.

A small walk of 5 minutes we were at the gates of the Bhuikot. There was this ticket counter of ASI , we paid Rs 25 per person and entered the Fort Complex.

Entrance point with the ASI office

The moment you enter you are welcomed by the neat Garden and 2 Cannons pointing at you.

Cannons pointing toward the entrance door

The Cannons are well polished and you have the year of manufacturing on them, Monogram of the rulers. 

Year of manufacturing carved on the cannons

Monogram of the Rulers on the cannon

Over the years I have made it a practice to first explore the fort along the top of the Fort walls, which gives me good birds-eye view of the place and later I explore from within.Hence we moved toward the right side and climbed the stairs to reach the top of wall of the fort.

We climbed these stairs to reach the flag post platform.

Grass has grown at most of the places hence the watchman told us to be careful of the creepy reptiles.We smiled and nodded and went on our way.The outer side of the fort walls had lots of shrubs grown but the inside portion was easily walk-able.

Way towards the Flag post (PC: Dr Neha Mehta)

moving to the left from the stairs we reached the highest point of the fort ie. the Flag post platform. Standing here we could see the Siddeshwar Temple across the lake.

Siddeshwar temple as see from Solapur Fort

We spent some time here enjoying the breeze, absorbing the beauty around us and of course clicking lots of pictures

Today we realised what does the term leaping in joy meant 

Until pooja and me drew Nikhil Crazy😆😆and he has to throw his arms high in despair as if saying Kamino ab bas karo aur aage bhi badho. And both of us were like Hum nahi sudharenge, Ek photo aur Please 😛😛

 

Bola tha na... ki Hum nahi sudherenge 😆😆

Talking about the construction of the fort, there is a moat around the fort thus this creates Two layer of fortification one outer wall then moat and then the main fort wall. This main Fort wall is around 30 metres broad.Due to overgrown grass and bushes it was difficult to circumvent the entire fort. Hence we descended down the same stairs from where we had come and moved toward an other attraction of this fort, 32 Minar ki masjid .

32 Pillar Mosque

This masjid is on left side near the back end of the fort. Its an old masjid with 32 pillars. Basically its in ruins, Not maintained at all.

Low roof supported by the pillars

Moving inside the masjid you realise  that the roof is quite low and the pillars standing are all more identical in shape.

Identical Pillars

 We spent some time here and moved towards the Shiv Temple which is next to this masjid.

The structure is in complete ruins. Had it not being for the shivling at the lower base, Its difficult to make out that this structure was a temple.

Ruins of shiv temple 

The brown grill that you are seeing in the picture above, the shivling is place below that and we could see fresh flowers on it which meant that its used for worshiping. 

Shivling with fresh flowers

What I found strange about this temple was that the pillars here too looks quite similar to the one that I saw in the masjid. The question in my mind was did the  same ruler made both masjid and temple or this structure was something else and now shown as temple...

Please note the design of pillars

History often leaves so many questions open.I would like to have your views in comment column what is your take on this. 

From here on we moved towards the teen Darwaza which the ASI guy at the ticket counter reminded us not to miss. Actually the entrance of the fort in ancient times were from these Darwazas or Gates. But ASI had changed the entrance from the road side.

Main Gate of the Fort

The Entry gate of the fort is quite formidable, two bastion like pillars with a windows  along top is something typical of the architectural  designs of those times.

This was the last site that we visited at the Bhuikot or Solapur fort.  Generally one hours is enough to explore this fort but it took nearly 2 hours for us.( too much time spent on photos and masti)  We were now quite hungry hence we planned to sit in the lawn of the fort and munch some biscuits and chips before moving on to our next destination Naldurg Fort.

To read about our journey from the beginning click here

Solapur in a day| Part 2 | Siddeshwar temple

In our first part of the blog we visited Solapur Municipal Building (click here to read part one) and a little walk of 100 metres and   we were at Siddeshwar Temple.

Siddeshwar temple is in Solapur District and is very sacred to hindus and the members of Lingayat faith. This temple is  surrounded by a lake which is actually full of algae and overgrown grass.

 It is a Gram Daivat which means God of the city.The temple wall at first glance could be easily mistaken as the fort wall. The huge board at the entrance ensures that you don't mistake it so.

Fort or Temple !!

The temple entrance like all the Indian temple is flanked with shops selling prasad, malas and colourful toys.

Festival of colours

 In India when you are entering any temple it offers so much colour and gaiety that one gets the feeling of coming to a huge Village fair.

Explosion of Colours

This temple is quite near the Solapur Railway station and Solapur Central Bus stand and can be easily reached by auto or even by walking, if you are ok with walking around 2 kms.

After depositing our shoes at the shoe counter .We started to move towards the temple.The temple wall was running on our right side and the lake on our left side and nestled in the laps of trees we could see glimpses of outer wall of Bhuikot or Solapur Fort.

Bhuikot at the far end can be seen from Temple

Just before the entrance there were two shivlings and opposite to there was this small Ganpati temple  where I paid my respect before entering the temple complex

Ek Salaam Ganpatiji ke naam

From here on we entered the main gate 

First look of the temple from the main entry gate

 As we entered the temple complex we saw hundreds of people with folded hands were chanting Om namo shivay behind the priest perched in the mandap and doing the yagna. The sound of slokas were resounding making the atmosphere all the more spiritual. 

 The best thing I liked about this temple was the size, which is very large and secondly it is very clean. Though there were so many people chanting and yet not for a moment we felt uncomfortable or hassled, infact we too enjoyed the occasion and the ambiance.

People chanting

Here an interesting thing happened, as these people were chanting I told my friend Nikhil to make the video of the same from my phone as he was handling my mobile and meanwhile I was taking pictures of the temple from my camera.

Temple top

Nikhil said "Aashish people will mind we rather not shoot the video" I said chod de mai video le leta hu" and I started to shoot the video. 

(Video Of Chanting shot by me)

Next I moved on to take the pictures of the temple when a local villager tapped me on my shoulder and said something in marathi which I was not able to comprehend but I was worried because Nikhil's words were now echoing in my mind,Hence I politely explained to him that I'm taking pictures so that I can write.

Beautiful Temple top

He asked me Tumhi Photographer aahe ka ?(Are you a photographer), I nodded and then he said "Mahja ek photo kada na" (Take one picture of mine) I was relieved and amused and said "Kaka me mandirachi photo kadto lokanchi nahi"(I take pictures of temples and not people). He smiled and I moved on to the main temple where we have the idol of Shivyogi shiddharameshwar. We paid our respect and came out of the temple. In case if you want to read more on Siddheshwar click here

Shivyogi shiddharameshwar idol

Talking about this temple with one of the locals I was told that January is the best month to visit as lots of ceremony takes place like Kaathiche Lagan which literally means marriage of sticks.then there is a famous Jatra (Religious Fair) happening around this time known as Gadda Yatra for 15 days and also lots of people come here to perform marriages and other important functions.

We moved out of the temple to go to the Bhuikot or Solapur Fort, our next destination.

Next blog me woh Bhi Dekha doonga 😆😆😆

Thank you for reading the blog. Please do comment and join my blog site. In case if you missed the first part of this blog click here and read.

Solapur in a day | Part 1 | Solapur Municipal Building

We slog through out the week at workplace and then comes the magical friday night. People with sane mind think of chilling out with friends over a glass of wine or beer, enjoy a good Sunday sleep Aur idhar hum Awara Ghumakad friday night yeh sapna dekhte hai ki yeh weekend kon sa saher ya konsa killa fathe karenge. Honestly speaking my whole week passes away like a breeze when I know I am going to explore a new place on the weekend.

This weekend I had planned to visit Siddeshwar temple, Bhuikot Fort aka Solapur Fort and Naldurg Fort.

This time I was lucky that I don't have to go solo because I had a wonderful company of my usual suspect kind of friends 😜 Nikhil and Pooja.

Train ke intezar ka apna hi maja hai

We took Siddeshwar express train from Dadar at 10.57 pm. As soon as we  boarded the train a very interesting thing happened, We saw this young boy sitting at the window seat. I think I might have looked at him sternly because he very defensively asked me kya yeh aap ki seat hai. I said nahi meri middle berth hai. He was relieved. After some time he looks at me and asked Mai mera saman seat ke neeche rakhunga toh chori to nahi hoga na, I was simply flabbergasted and my reflex action response was Arre mere ko kya maloom, rakh ke dekh le...subha tak maloom pad jayega. ( Honestly I wanted to say Oye kya hum chor nazar aate hai 😉 Anyways we had a good laugh over this. The young boy was actually very sweet chap, he had come to give interview for Railway job for engineer post. These kind of experience adds spice to your life  because travelling in train always allows you to meet different people and you enjoy your journey all the more.

Liked the pole at a traffic circle

It was 7 am when we reached Solapur station. We came out of the station and had our breakfast of Poha from the local Thela Guy and started to walk to our first destination that is Siddeshwar Temple. Normally one can take auto from the railway station and reach the temple but I prefer to walk if the destination is well within 2 kms. My idea of early morning walk is that one can actually have the local feel of the city. As I said that walking allows you to explore something which is not on your destination, well something same happened with us. As we were on our way to Siddeshwar temple we saw this fantastic building whose architecture fascinated me so I took a detour and started to explore the same. The Building was actually Solapur Municipal Office.

Beautiful Solapur Municipal Building

Ab samaj me aaya , mai kyo chal kar explore karne me believe karta hu. Had we been travelling in any auto we could have easily missed out on this pretty building.

The architecture of the building is very artistic. The colourful windows and arches makes it a photographers delight.

Beautifully designed windows

 There was  a statue of a person in front of the main entrance hence out of curiosity I went ahead and read the name of the person. Well the name embbed on the statue was Rao Bahadur Mallappa Alias Appasaheb Warad. For me it was unknown name so I spoke to one of the person working there and the information that he gave me was amazing.The information so collected from the local and my research put together showed the various aspect of this person.

Rao Bahadur Mallappa Alias Appasaheb Warad

Life of  Rao Bahadur Mallappa:

 Rao Bahadur Mallappa Alias Appasaheb Warad can be regarded as one of the makers of the Sholapur City. He was born on 18th June,1851 in a Lingayat family at Sholapur. He had no formal education and no knowledge of English,yet his thinking, his vision, his mature understanding of the ways of the world placed him among the then prominent leaders of the city. He was a reformist in agricultural techniques.A special quality of groundnut cultivated by him was popularly known as "Warad Shengdana"

Sculptures on the building

He was thick with eminent personalities of his time like Justice M.G.Telang, Justice M.G.Ranade, Lokmanya Tilak. His discussions with Lokmanya Tilak resulted in a kind of co-operative scheme for the weavers community of Sholapur. But the government did not approve it. He was more an institution than an individual.

Sculptures on the building

He was elected as a delegate in 1893, to present the city in Indian National Congress. He donated generously and without any discrimination to each and every good cause. The estimated amount of donations is not less than six lakh rupees. He donated generously for "Tilak Defence Fund"

Some interesting arches and statues

When Warad died on 19th January 1911,Lokmanya Tilak made a special mention of him in his letter from jail on hearing this sad news.

Ornate Viewing area on terrace

I don't know how far this is truth but the local person told me that Appasaheb Warad had lots of outstanding taxes to be paid, due to which he has to handover this building in lieu of  those outstanding taxes. He also said that in earlier days this was the largest and tallest building in Solapur and one could see most of Solapur from the terrace of the building.

Breathtaking view 

Kahani Saachi hai ya Jhooti woh ek alag baat hai As far as I am concerned I often feel transported to olden times when someone narrates such kind of tales.

Dil toh bacha hai ji ....Ek kahani sunne ka mara hai ji

After spending some time here we moved on to the Siddeshwar temple which was just 2 minutes away from here.