Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state and it holds more founding sites than any other. Varanasi on the Ganges is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and is the principal place where Hindus come to die and be cremated, on the understanding that death there releases the soul; its riverfront steps are the visible form of that. Prayagraj, at the meeting of the Ganges and the Yamuna, hosts the largest Kumbh Mela, which at its full cycle assembles tens of millions of people in a temporary city built on the sand.
Ayodhya is the birthplace of Rama in the Ramayana; Mathura and Vrindavan, a hundred kilometres downstream from Delhi, are where Krishna is said to have been born and to have spent his childhood, and Vrindavan's economy still turns on the pilgrims and widows who settle there. Sarnath, on the edge of Varanasi, is where the Buddha gave his first teaching after awakening.
The state is also central to modern South Asian Islam. The seminary founded at Deoband in 1866 shaped a reformist current now influential from Britain to Indonesia, and the Nadwatul Ulama at Lucknow was founded shortly afterwards with a different curriculum and a different view of how to meet the colonial situation. Lucknow was the capital of Awadh, whose Shia court gave the city a distinctive Muharram observance that continues.