Bhole Baba Ashram of Cisternino

The Cisternino ashram
In the 1980s, a temple identical to that of Hera Khan was built in Cisternino and, in the early 1990s, a dhuni twin to the Indian one. The Cisternino ashram is directly connected to the main HeraKhan ashram. Various courses and concerts (particularly Indian and Nepalese music) are held in the ashram. Non-Shaivite masters are also invited.
The residents
About fifty people have moved permanently to the valley. They live in ancient trulli in the shade of olive, fig, oak, almond and carob trees. They carry out activities partly connected to the ashram and partly autonomous, from organic farming to the management of a vegetarian farm. Their experience is called “Bhole Baba City”.
Give hospitality
The ashram can accommodate around 40 people in large dormitories or two-bed rooms and offer three vegetarian meals a day. Two to three people receive a small salary, room and board for serving full time.

The Bhole Baba ashram in Cisternino was born in 1979 on the initiative of Lisetta Carmi. It is located in the Itria valley, a plateau where peaceful worshipers of the Great Mother lived in the Neolithic period. The ashram is inspired by the teaching of the legendary Indian master Babaji, considered by devotees to be an avatar of Shiva.

The Cisternino Ashram Center is located high up on a hill in Contrada Portarino and can be reached via an intricate network of sheep tracks, dry stone walls and dirt paths, among the farms and trulli that dot the area and is a place of peace and meditation (Ashram in Sanskrit means "place to live abandoned to the divine").
The Center was founded in 1979 by three women, one from Milan, one from Germany and one from Genoa who met in India, in Herakan, a village in the Himalayas, one of whom is Lisetta Carmi, who still lives in Cisternino.
These three women would have been tasked by Bohle Baba with founding the first Western Ashram in Cisternino, a place where, according to the ancients, a lot of energy is concentrated.