Kailasanathar Temple, Thingalur

Kailasanathar Temple in Thingalur village, roughly midway between Thanjavur and Kumbakonam, is the Navagraha shrine associated with Chandra, the Moon, though the temple’s principal deity — as its name indicates — is Shiva, worshipped here as Kailasanathar. A subsidiary shrine to Chandra gives the site its place in Tamil Nadu’s nine-temple planetary circuit, and devotional tradition offers two explanations for its sanctity: one recounts that the merchant Appoodi Adikal, while hosting the wandering Nayanar saint Thirunavukkarasar (Appar), lost his son to a snakebite and saw the child miraculously revived by the saint’s intervention; the other holds that Chandra himself came here to worship Shiva and recover the fullness of his light after being diminished by a curse, a local telling of the wider Puranic story of the Moon’s waning under Daksha’s curse.

The temple’s original structure is credited to the Chola dynasty, though the masonry standing today was rebuilt under the Nayak rulers in the 16th century. While the village of Thingalur is named in the 7th-century Tevaram hymns of the Nayanar saints, it is classified specifically as a Vaippu Sthalam — a site the hymns mention without directly addressing its presiding deity — placing it a notch below the fuller Paadal Petra Sthalam status held by many other Tevaram-era temples in the region. A three-tiered rajagopuram and the temple’s Chandrapushkarani tank remain notable features, and the shrine draws its steadiest devotion on Mondays and during the Margazhi Thiruvadirai festival, both traditionally tied to lunar worship.