New Mayapur (ISKCON)

New Mayapur is an ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) château and farm community in the Indre department of central France, near the town of Luçay-le-Mâle and not far from Châteauroux. Housed in the Château d’Oublaise, a building dating to 1905, it follows the pattern of several other European ISKCON rural properties — such as Belgium’s Radhadesh and England’s Bhaktivedanta Manor — where a country estate was converted into a combined temple, farming community, and gathering place for Krishna-conscious devotees following the teachings of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, ISKCON’s founder. Its name echoes Mayapur, West Bengal, the birthplace of the sixteenth-century saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and the international headquarters of the ISKCON movement.

Sources disagree on the community’s founding date. The temple’s own site and a detailed ISKCON News profile describe Prabhupada personally selecting the property in July 1974, devotees relocating there that autumn, Gaura-Nitai deities being installed that winter, and Prabhupada returning in 1975 and 1976 to install Sri Sri Krishna Balarama — murtis described as the only Krishna-Balarama deities Prabhupada personally installed anywhere in the Western world. French Wikipedia, by contrast, states the château was formally purchased in 1980 by William Ehrlichman (known within ISKCON as Srila Bhagavan Das), the movement’s guru for southern Europe at the time, who retained it after his 1986 departure from ISKCON leadership. Independent of which date marks the “true” founding, Indradyumna Swami, a long-serving ISKCON guru, is separately recorded as having served as temple president at New Mayapur in the early 1980s.

Today the temple’s altar centers on Sri Sri Radha Govinda Madhava and Sri Sri Krishna Balarama, alongside Laksmi Nrsimhadeva and Giri Govardhana, and the community runs regular public programs including Open House Sundays, Discovery Week-Ends, and Monk Weeks for visitors interested in monastic life.