Puri's temple kitchen claims never to run short of food no matter how many pilgrims arrive, a devotional claim about logistics that the kitchen's own scale makes at least plausible.
Cooking for an unpredictable crowd
The temple's kitchen, among the largest institutional kitchens in the world, prepares mahaprasad using a traditional method of stacking clay pots over wood fires, reportedly cooking the pot at the top of the stack first despite being furthest from the flame, a claimed technical curiosity temple tradition treats as itself a small daily wonder. Temple lore holds the kitchen has never run short of food regardless of how many pilgrims show up on a given day, a claim resting on devotional confidence as much as on kitchen logistics.
Only for some visitors
Entry to the temple's inner sanctum has traditionally been restricted to Hindus, a policy the temple administration continues to enforce and that has drawn periodic legal challenges and public debate in India over whether such restrictions are appropriate at a major public monument, a dispute this entry notes as ongoing rather than resolved.
A festival that moves the gods themselves
During the annual Rath Yatra, the temple's deities are placed on massive wooden chariots and pulled through Puri's streets by enormous crowds, one of the few major Hindu rituals in which the images are understood to leave the temple building entirely rather than being processed only within its grounds or a limited local circuit.