Krishna's Butterball

Krishna's Butterball is a giant granite boulder about 6 metres in diameter, balancing on a smooth slope with a contact area that looks impossibly small. It sits in the main monument area, between the beachside Shore Temple and the inland Pancha Rathas, and is impossible to miss — it draws crowds of visitors posing against it for photographs that attempt to show the rock "rolling" off their hands.

The name comes from a local story that the rock fell from the sky and is a ball of butter stolen by the god Krishna. Whatever its origin, the geology is real: it is a natural boulder that has been in its current position for at least 1,300 years, as it appears in medieval Tamil literature. You can walk under its lower edge — clearance is about two metres on the downslope side.

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A story
Despite weighing an estimated 250 tonnes and resting on a slope at a steep angle, Krishna's Butterball has never moved — not when Pallava kings tried to dislodge it with elephants, not during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and not during centuries of attempts by local children to push it off. Engineers who have studied its geometry say the contact point is actually large enough to be stable, but the illusion of precariousness is so perfect that the mind refuses to believe it.