Raichur Fort
A double-walled stone-and-mud fort in the heart of the Raichur Doab, the fiercely contested triangle of land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers fought over by the Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagara Empire for two centuries.
Raichur Fort was built in the early thirteenth century by a Kakatiya governor and later massively strengthened by the Bahmani Sultans, whose Persian-style gateways and inscriptions still mark its walls. Its outer wall of rough-hewn granite blocks and an inner wall in mortared masonry enclose a citadel that has survived largely intact.
The fort’s real importance lies in its location: Raichur sits at the heart of the Doab, the river-bounded tract that both the Vijayanagara Empire and the Bahmani (later Bijapur) Sultanate needed to control for access to the Krishna–Tungabhadra basin. The decisive Battle of Raichur in 1520, in which Vijayanagara’s Krishnadevaraya defeated the Bijapur Sultanate using early field artillery, was fought for possession of exactly this fort.
Getting there: Raichur town is a major railway junction on the Mumbai–Chennai and Hyderabad–Bengaluru lines. The fort stands at the southern edge of the old town, a short auto-rickshaw ride from the post office.
The site itself
Where to get your stamp cancelled
This may not be next to the site itself — some post offices serve several nearby landmarks.
- Post office
- Raichur Post Office
- Pincode
- 584101
- Address
- Raichur Head Post Office, Station Road, Raichur Town, Raichur District, Karnataka
Sources
- Project maintainer transcription of the physical Philately Passport booklet (district/landmark/post office list)
- Raichur pincode/post office record — Pincode.net.in