Panniyur Sri Varahamurthy Temple

The Panniyur Sri Varahamurthy Temple is at Kumbidi in Pattambi taluk, Palakkad district. It is dedicated to Varaha, the boar avatar of Vishnu, shown with the goddess Bhumi, and is listed among the 108 Abhimana Kshethrams of the Vaishnava tradition. Tradition holds it to be the first temple Parasurama consecrated in Kerala: when the land he had pulled from the sea kept rising, Vishnu told him to worship the Varaha form, and the temple is said to be about 4,000 years old.

Panniyur's Varaha is said to have been revered for centuries as the supreme god of Kerala, and recently found stone inscriptions mention the Panniyuraayiram, a thousand-member body that ran the temple's religious and cultural life some 1,200 years ago. A well-known legend tells how the master carpenter Perumthachan, snubbed by the workmen renovating the temple, quietly marked their timber so that every pillar came out short, then came back in the night and finished the work himself.