Along with the founding of temples, one of the traditional pious duties of an Indian monarch was to look after the livelihood of the kingdom's priestly, intellectual and administrative elite, the Brahmins, through the donation of land and the establishment of Brahmin villages (agraharas). Despite the existence of numerous inscriptions from the medieval period attesting to the foundation of such villages, survival of the settlements themselves is rare. This article is an architectural analysis of the village of Birabalabhadrapur, Orissa, one of the Sasana ('royal edict') Brahmin villages near Puri.