The chariot festival of Puri

Once a year the gods of Puri leave their temple. In the bright fortnight of Ashadha the three images are brought out and set on three chariots built new each year — Balabhadra's with fourteen wheels, Subhadra's with twelve, Jagannath's Nandighosha with sixteen, each over forty feet high — and hauled by the crowd along the Grand Road to the Gundicha temple, held to be their aunt's house. They stay there a week. On the return, the Bahuda Yatra, they pause at the Mausi Maa temple to be offered the fried pancake called poda pitha before re-entering their own shrine. The festival has been kept for more than eight hundred years and is the oldest and largest of its kind.