The Trincomalee Bay, bridged by the Mahavilli Ganga River to the south, the historical "Gokarna" in Sanskrit, means "Cow's Ear", akin to other sites of Siva worship across the Indian subcontinent.

Uniquely, Trincomalee is a Pancha Ishwaram, a Paadal Petra Sthalam, a Maha Shakta pitha and Murugan Tiruppadai of Sri Lanka; its sacred status to the Hindus has led to it being declared "Dakshina-Then Kailasam" or "Mount Kailash of the South" and the "Rome of the Pagans of the Orient".

Thiru is a generally used epithet denoting a "sacred" temple site while Malai means mountain or hill; Middle Tamil manuscripts and inscriptions mention the monumental compound shrine as the Thirukonamalai Konesar Kovil.

[13] The ethnographer Megasthenes writing in his Indica from 350 — 290 BCE, describes the island as being divided by a long river, productive of a large number of gold and pearls in one half and that the inhabitants of this country are called Paleogoni, meaning Old Goni in Tamil and Greek, who Pliny adds worshipped Hercules and Dionysus (Bacchus) like the Pandyans of Tamilakam.

"[14] The bay is also referred to as Gokaranna according to a Sanskrit inscription in Grantha script excavated on a doorjamb at the Hindu temple dated to Tamil New Years Day 1223 CE.

[17][18] It was in the Puranas that the shrine first found reference as Koneiswara Parwatia, motivating Kullakottan Chola who learnt of its sanctity to sail to Trincomalee and develop the three Hindu temples of the Koneswaram compound.

[19][20][21] The compiler of the Yoga Sutras, Patañjali's place of birth at the temple corroborates Tirumular's Tirumandhiram, which describes him as hailing from Then Kailasam and his self description as a "Gonardiya" from Gonarda, "a country in the southern and eastern division" of the Indian continent.

Due to the santamarutham, eight (8) kodumudigal (parts) fell from kailasam into 8 different places: are Thirugonamalai (Trincomalee), Thirukalahasti, Thiruchiramalai, Thiruenkoimalai, Rajathagiri, Neerthagiri, Ratnagiri, and Suwethagiri Thirupangeeli.

[31] Over its long history, Trincomalee, and specifically the Swami Rock promontory, has housed several Kovil temples to deities of the Hindu pantheon, as well as a Buddhist vihara and a Christian Catholic church, both introduced following invasions.

Mahabharata continues that the shrine is the next pilgrimage spot for Hindus en route south following Kanyakumari of the early Pandyan kingdom and Tamraparni island (Kudiramalai).

[18][36][37][38] One of Trincomalee's suburbs, Kankuveli is home to ruins of the Tamil Siddhar medical university established by Agastya, the "Agathiyar Thapanam", which alongside his other shrines at Sivan Oli Padam Malai, helped spread Tamraparniyan science across the continent during the pre-classical era.

Mahasena of Anuradhapura, according to the Mahavamsa and the later Culavamsa, destroyed the devalaya temple compound in Trincomalee housing Siva lingas in it, and built a Mahayana Buddhist edifice in its stead.

He worked under the tutelage of Sangamitta, the Tamil Buddhist monk from the early Chola country, who had intervened to avenge the persecution of Vetullavada adherents during the Tamraparniyan Abhayagiri versus Maha Viharaya sectarianism in Anuradhapura.

[42] Early Tamil dynasties continued to employ the city as the prefectural capital of the Trincomalee District, allowing administrative duties to be handled by elected Vanniar chiefs.

[50] Two powerful merchant guilds of the time – the Manigramam and the Five Hundred Lords of Ayyavolu emerged in the region during Chola trade with the far east and the conquest of Srivijaya of the Malay Archipelago.

[51][52][53] The Koneswaram temple compounds, the city and its adjacent region, from Periyakulam and Manankerni in the north, Kantalai and Pothankadu in the west, and Verugal in the south, formed a great Saiva Tamil principality of the island's state Mummudi Chola Mandalam.

Following some benefaction of the shrine by Gajabahu II, his successor King Parakramabahu I used Trincomalee as his eastern port, to launch a successful invasion of Burma in the 12th century.

[55][56] At this time, Trincomalee was trading pearls, precious stones, vessels, elephants, muslins, baqam and cinnamon, and was passed by Chinese voyager Ma Huan by ship, eight days from the Nicobar islands, on his way to Tenavaram temple.

The Nicholson Cove Tombstone inscriptions at Trincomalee refer to the deceased as the daughter of the chief Badriddin Husain Bin Ali Al-Halabi, showing that her family hailed from Halab (Aleppo) in Syria.

The city even attracted Arunagirinathar in 1468, who traversed the Pada Yatra pilgrimage route from Nallur Kandaswamy temple to Katirkamam while stopping to pay homage to Koneswaram's Murukan shrine.

[63] Jaffna had given minimal logistical access to its Trincomalee and Batticaloa seaports to the Kandyan kingdom to secure military advantages against its enemies; this was used by their influential European overlords to consolidate power in the region.

In a 1638 letter to Dutch Colonial Governor Anthony van Diemen, an officer mentions that Trincomalee is a "fort built rather strongly of hard stones from an old pagoda round the hillock.

[4] An English sea captain and his son, the writer named Robert Knox, came ashore by chance near Trincomalee and were captured and held in captivity by the Kandyan king in 1659.

[70][71] Jacob Burnand, a Swiss soldier in the service of the Dutch and the Governor of Batticaloa, composed a memoir on his administration there in 1794, noting Trincomalee to be an important fortified town in the Tamil nation.

In 1795 the British recaptured the city and held it until Sri Lanka's independence in 1948, with a claimed aim of "preventing Napoleon invading the colony" if left under the Dutch.

Their rule is sealed with the Treaty of Amiens, and the last Vanniar, Pandara Vannian is executed by the British – a pension is paid to his widow, the Vannichi, until the late 19th century.

The British admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson called Trincomalee "the finest harbour in the world", while the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger called the city "the most valuable colonial possession on the globe, as giving to our Indian Empire a security which it had not enjoyed from its establishment" and the harbour "the finest and most advantageous Bay in the whole of India".

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories feature multiple settings in the city, including in A Scandal in Bohemia and A Singular Affair at Trincomalee.

[citation needed] In 1950, one of the original shrine's gold and copper alloy bronze statues from the 10th century CE of a seated figure of Shiva (in the form of Somaskanda), Shiva as Chandrasekhar, his consort goddess Parvati, a statue of the goddess Mathumai Ambal and later Lord Ganesh were found by the Urban Council of Trincomalee buried 500 yards from the promontory's end while digging for a water well.

[82] On 3 March 2023, President Ranil Wickremesinghe instructed the petroleum minister and officials to promptly implement a strategy to revitalize the Trincomalee oil tank farm and integrate it into the nation's economy.