Where it happened

Places

Every location where the history unfolded — each place gathers the events that happened there. Open any place on the map.

Sacred sites

Abbotsford
British Columbia, Canada
Home of the Gur Sikh Temple, opened in 1911 — the oldest surviving gurdwara in North America, and the only one outside India and Pakistan designated a National Historic Site.
1 event
Anandpur Sahib
Punjab, India
A town in the Shivalik foothills founded by Guru Tegh Bahadur; the birthplace of the Khalsa, created here by Guru Gobind Singh on Vaisakhi 1699.
3 events
Frankfurt
Hesse, Germany
A centre of Sikh life in Germany, whose community is unusual in the diaspora for how much of it arrived not from Punjab but as refugees from Afghanistan.
0 events
Goindwal
Tarn Taran district, Punjab, India
The town on the Beas that Guru Amar Das made the centre of the faith for some three decades, with its baoli of eighty-four steps. The ferry there was also the crossing where the Dal Khalsa struck Ahmad Shah Abdali's returning column in 1761.
1 event
Kabul
Afghanistan
Once home to tens of thousands of Sikhs, Afghanistan now has a community numbered in the dozens. Gurdwara Karte Parwan is the last one standing in Kabul, and it has been attacked repeatedly.
1 event
Kartarpur
Punjab, Pakistan
The village on the river Ravi where Guru Nanak established the first Sikh community and spent his final years; reachable from India since 2019 via the Kartarpur Corridor.
2 events
Makindu
Makueni County, Kenya
A gurdwara on the Mombasa–Nairobi road, built in 1926 by Sikhs working on the Uganda Railway, which has kept its doors, kitchen and beds open to every traveller of any faith ever since.
1 event
Nanded
Maharashtra, India
The city on the Godavari in the Deccan where Guru Gobind Singh spent his final days and, before his death in 1708, vested eternal Guruship in the Guru Granth Sahib. Site of Takht Sri Hazur Sahib.
1 event
Nankana Sahib
Punjab, Pakistan
The birthplace of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, in 1469; formerly the village of Rai Bhoi Ki Talwandi, renamed in his honour.
2 events
Novellara
Emilia-Romagna, Italy
A small town in the Po valley with one of Italy's largest Sikh communities, working the dairy farms that produce Parmigiano-Reggiano. Its purpose-built gurdwara, opened in 2000, was the first in Italy.
1 event
Olot
Catalonia, Spain
A town in the Catalan interior whose meat-processing plants drew one of Spain's most settled Sikh communities — an unusual case of Sikhs working in an industry many of them will not eat from.
0 events
Rosario de la Frontera
Salta Province, Argentina
A town in northern Argentina holding the only gurdwara in South America, serving a community of a few hundred descended from railway workers and later arrivals turned away from North America.
0 events
Singapore
Singapore
Where Sikhs arrived first as exiled prisoners and then as colonial policemen, and where the Central Sikh Temple grew out of a police gurdwara at Pearl's Hill.
0 events
Southall
London, United Kingdom
The west London suburb that became the heart of Sikh Britain, and home to Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha — the largest gurdwara in Europe and the largest Sikh organisation outside India.
1 event
Stockton
California, United States
The San Joaquin Valley city where the first gurdwara in the United States opened in 1912 — for half a century the only one on the West Coast, and a centre of the Ghadar independence movement.
1 event
Sultanpur Lodhi
Punjab, India
The town on the Kali Bein rivulet where, by tradition, Guru Nanak received his revelation and declared his mission before setting out on his travels.
1 event
Woolgoolga
New South Wales, Australia
A coastal banana-farming town in New South Wales where Punjabi settlers built Australia's first gurdwara in 1968, and where about one in six residents is Sikh.
1 event

Cities

Amritsar
Punjab, India
The spiritual capital of Sikhism, grown around the sacred pool (amrit sarovar) begun by Guru Ram Das; home to the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) and the Akal Takht.
13 events
Chandigarh
Chandigarh (Union Territory), India
The planned city built to replace Lahore as Punjab's capital after Partition, and since 1966 the shared capital of both Punjab and Haryana — a union territory belonging to neither, on an arrangement that was meant to be temporary and has lasted sixty years.
1 event
Delhi
Delhi, India
The Mughal imperial capital; site of the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur at Chandni Chowk in 1675 and the execution of Banda Singh Bahadur in 1716.
5 events
Lahore
Punjab, Pakistan
Historic capital of the Punjab; seat of the Mughal governors under whom Guru Arjan was martyred, and later the capital of Ranjit Singh's Sikh Empire until the British annexation of 1849.
9 events
Multan
Punjab, Pakistan
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the subcontinent and the fortified key to the south-western Punjab. Its capture in 1818, after a siege of months, opened the Sikh Empire's expansion beyond the Punjab proper.
2 events
Sirhind
Fatehgarh Sahib district, Punjab, India
The Mughal provincial seat between Delhi and Lahore, and the place where the two youngest sons of Guru Gobind Singh were executed in December 1704. The town the Khalsa took in 1710 and the district that now carries the name Fatehgarh Sahib — the fort of victory — after them.
2 events
Vancouver
British Columbia, Canada
The port where the Komagata Maru lay at anchor for two months in 1914 while its passengers were refused entry, and the centre of the early Sikh community in Canada — the Khalsa Diwan Society gurdwara there opened in 1908.
1 event

Battlefields

Chamkaur Sahib
Rupnagar district, Punjab, India
A small town on the Sirhind canal north of Rupnagar, where in December 1704 Guru Gobind Singh and around forty Sikhs held a mud-walled haveli against a Mughal army, and where his two elder sons were killed.
1 event
Chappar Chiri
Punjab, India
The plain near Sirhind where Banda Singh Bahadur's forces defeated the Mughal governor Wazir Khan in 1710, establishing the first sovereign Sikh rule in the Punjab.
1 event
Kup
Punjab, India
The site near Malerkotla of the Vadda Ghallughara ('great massacre') of 1762, when Ahmad Shah Durrani's forces killed tens of thousands of Sikhs in a single day.
1 event
Sri Muktsar Sahib
Punjab, India
A water reservoir in the dry Malwa country, called Khidrana until the battle fought at it in December 1705 gave it the name it now carries — the pool of liberation, for the forty who died there.
1 event

Forts

Jamrud
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
The fort at the eastern mouth of the Khyber Pass, built by the Sikh Empire in 1836 to hold the pass against Afghan forces. Hari Singh Nalwa died defending it in 1837 — the furthest north-west any Punjab-based power had held that frontier in centuries.
1 event

Regions

Gurdaspur
Punjab, India
The district in the Bari Doab between the Beas and the Ravi. Its marshes at Kahnuwan, and the wooded country running up to the Himalayan foothills, were the refuge Sikh bands fell back into when the plains were closed to them — and where they were caught in 1746.
1 event
Wagah–Attari (Radcliffe Line)
Punjab, India–Pakistan border
The border crossing on the Grand Trunk Road marking the 1947 Radcliffe Line that partitioned the Punjab between India and Pakistan, uprooting millions of Sikhs from the western districts.
1 event