Varanasi - Manikarnika Ghat

25.3176°N, 82.9739°E.

Hindu pilgrimage city on a 6.8 km curve of the Ganges in northern India, where the river bends to flow north — auspicious in Hindu cosmology. Continuously inhabited since at least 1800 BCE, making Varanasi one of the oldest continuously occupied cities on Earth. Eighty-eight ghats (stone stairways) line the western bank where pilgrims bathe, perform sandhya rituals, and cremate the dead. Manikarnika Ghat, the principal cremation ghat, has burned bodies daily for an estimated 3,500 years; the cremation fires are kept continuously alight by Dom Raja attendants, with each pyre using approximately 350 kg of wood for a four-hour cremation. Hindu doctrine holds that those cremated at Manikarnika are released from the cycle of rebirth (moksha). The Kashi Vishwanath temple of Shiva, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, anchors the central religious axis.

A river that flows the wrong way on its way through the city has been burning the dead for thirty-five centuries without ever going out.