Somnath’s story begins in ambiguity and myth. According to tradition, the Moon god Chandra, cursed and diminished for favoring one of his wives over the others, built a temple here and worshipped Shiva to be freed from the affliction — giving the temple its name, “Somnath,” Lord of the Moon (Soma). The site is also associated with the Triveni Sangam, the confluence of three rivers — the Kapila, Hiran, and the mythical Saraswati — a geography that has long made Prabhas Patan a place of pilgrimage even beyond the temple itself, with references appearing in ancient texts including the Mahabharata and the Skanda Purana.

The earliest verifiable temple structure is generally dated to around the 9th century, when the Gurjara-Pratihara king Nagabhata II is recorded as having built a version of the temple using red sandstone. But it was the temple’s wealth and sanctity that made it a repeated target: in 1026 CE, the Turkic ruler Mahmud of Ghazni led a force across the Thar Desert to raid Somnath, plundering its treasures and desecrating the Jyotirlinga in one of the most infamous episodes in medieval Indian history. The temple was restored soon after under King Bhoja of Malwa and Bhimdev I of the Solanki dynasty of Anhilwara, only to face further destruction over the following centuries at the hands of subsequent invaders, including attacks attributed to Aurangzeb in the 17th century.

This cycle of destruction and reconstruction, repeated across nearly a millennium, earned Somnath the title “the Shrine Eternal” — a temple whose faith, according to popular telling, has simply outlasted every attempt to erase it.
The temple’s modern chapter began in November 1947, when Vallabhbhai Patel, then India’s Deputy Prime Minister, visited the region shortly after the integration of Junagadh into independent India and proposed the temple’s reconstruction. The Shree Somnath Trust was formed to oversee the effort, and traditional Somapuri temple builders of Gujarat were engaged for the work. Patel did not live to see the project’s completion; it continued under K. M. Munshi, another minister in the Government of India, and on 11th May 1951, President Dr. Rajendra Prasad performed the installation ceremony for the newly rebuilt temple — the structure that stands today, chaired ex officio by the sitting Prime Minister of India.