Ratha Yatra, the "chariot festival", is the great festival of Puri in Odisha, in which the deity Jagannath (a form of Krishna/Vishnu), with his brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra, is brought out of the famous temple and drawn through the streets on three colossal wooden chariots to a garden temple some distance away, staying for a week before the return journey. It falls on the second day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha (June-July). Uniquely, it is the one occasion on which these deities, whose temple bars non-Hindus, are brought out into public view, so that all may see them; enormous crowds haul the chariots by hand with great ropes.
The festival is the source of the English word "juggernaut", from early European travellers' reports (some exaggerated) of the immense cars and the crush of pilgrims. Theologically it expresses the accessibility of the divine, the Lord leaving the seclusion of the sanctuary to come among the ordinary people, and the pulling of the chariot is itself held to be a meritorious act. New chariots are built each year to a fixed design and dismantled after; the images themselves are wooden and, in a rare rite, periodically replaced. Ratha Yatras modelled on Puri's are now held in many cities worldwide, spread especially by the Hare Krishna movement.