{"id":12774,"date":"2013-05-14T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2013\/05\/14\/hindu-origin-ponagar-festival-opens-in-vietnam\/"},"modified":"2013-05-14T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T12:00:00","slug":"hindu-origin-ponagar-festival-opens-in-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2013\/05\/14\/hindu-origin-ponagar-festival-opens-in-vietnam\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu-Origin Ponagar Festival Opens in Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tuoitrenews.vn\/lifestyle\/9196\/nationallyrecognized-ponagar-festival-open\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>VIETNAM, May 1, 2013 (Tuoi Tre News): The Ponagar fest, the biggest cultural event held by Cham people in the south of the central region, kicked off on April 30 in Khanh Hoa&#8217;s Nha Trang coastal city. The event also earned the recognition as an intangible national heritage the same day.<\/p>\n<p>From April 30th to May 2nd when the festival takes place, the 1,200-year-old Ponagar tower is open free of charge to tourists. Roughly 60,000 pilgrims and visitors, almost double last year&#8217;s number, are expected to join the four-day festival. The festival features such rituals as dressing up the Ponagar Goddess, requiems, floating flowers and colored lanterns, processions and offerings to the Goddess and Cham traditional dances.<\/p>\n<p>The fest, held annually in the third month of the lunar calendar, is to pay tribute to Goddess Yan Po Nagar, or Thien Y Thanh Mau in Vietnamese, who is identified with the Hindu Goddesses Bhagavati and Mahishasuramardini. As legend has it, Thien Y Thanh Mau taught locals how to do farming, weaving and knitting along with several other vocations to fend for themselves and safeguarded them from calamities and wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source VIETNAM, May 1, 2013 (Tuoi Tre News): The Ponagar fest, the biggest cultural event held by Cham people in,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}