Sri Gauranga Bari Temple

The most important pilgrimage site in the Katwa subdivision and among the most sacred locations in all of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. This is the exact site where Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the great Bengali mystic, reformer and founder of the devotional tradition that eventually became ISKCON, took the sanyasa (monastic) vows that transformed him from Nimai Pandita into Sri Krishna Chaitanya, on the auspicious day of Makar Sankranti in January 1510 CE. He was 24 years old. He never returned to Katwa, and spent the remaining 24 years of his life in Puri, Odisha. The Gauranga Bari Temple was established at this site by his devoted follower Sri Gadadhara Das.
The temple complex is dense with sacred associations. At the entrance is the full samadhi (memorial tomb) of Sri Gadadhara Das, the temple’s founder. In the courtyard stands an ancient Ashvatta (sacred fig) tree, or rather, a successor that has grown from its offshoots, as the original no longer survives, under which Chaitanya’s head was shaved by the weeping barber Madhu. The five witnesses to the sanyasa ceremony are named on a platform surrounding the tree; Chaitanya’s own hair is preserved in a samadhi beneath it. Elsewhere in the complex are the stone footprints of both Sri Keshava Bharati (the guru) and Chaitanya himself, and the specific location of the sanyasa initiation. The current temple building is modest: the significance here is entirely devotional and historical, not architectural.