Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Pakistan gathers two Punjabi cities that carry the Sikh tradition's founding and its fifth guru's death alongside centuries of Sufi devotion in the same province.

Kartarpur on the Ravi is where Guru Nanak settled after his travels, farming and gathering the first Sikh community around a daily discipline of work, worship and the shared meal, and where he died in 1539. The gurdwara Darbar Sahib marks the site, on the Pakistani side of the border drawn in 1947, and a visa free corridor from India was opened to pilgrims in 2019. A different Kartarpur, near Jalandhar in Indian Punjab, holds the manuscript known as the Kartarpur Bir, a separate place this atlas is careful not to conflate with the guru's own town.

Lahore has long been a major center of Muslim and Sikh religious life in the Punjab. The shrine of Ali Hujwiri, known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, whose Persian treatise Kashf al-Mahjub is among the earliest systematic works on Sufism in that language, draws visitors continuously, and the Badshahi Mosque built under Aurangzeb in 1673 is one of the largest in South Asia. Guru Arjan, the fifth Sikh guru, died in Mughal custody at Lahore in 1606, and the gurdwara Dera Sahib marks that site as well.

Between a village where the first Sikh community began and a Mughal capital where its fifth guru died, the two cities carry the tradition's opening and one of its earliest martyrdoms within the same province.