Kozhikode (Kerala): For 35 years, retired schoolteacher Gopinathan Namboothiri, 71, has had one obsession: spices. Not cooking them, not selling them — just collecting them. Today, his three-room house in a quiet lane in Kozhikode’s Nadakkavu neighbourhood is home to 11,340 labelled spice jars from 94 countries, enough to earn him an official Guinness World Record certificate as the holder of the world’s largest collection of labelled spice jars.
The Guinness World Records team visited Kozhikode last month to verify and count the collection, which took four officials two full days to catalogue. Each jar is meticulously labelled with the spice name, country of origin, year of acquisition, and the name of the person who brought it to Namboothiri. The jars range from tiny sample vials containing rare Tibetan saffron to large containers of smoked paprika from Spain.
Namboothiri, who taught Malayalam and Social Science at a government school for 33 years before retiring, said the collection began almost accidentally when a student gifted him a jar of black pepper from Wayanad in 1989. “I put it on a shelf. Then another student got me cardamom. It just kept growing — I never planned a world record,” he said, laughing, as he carefully dusted a jar of Georgian fenugreek.
The collection includes 43 varieties of pepper alone, 27 types of cinnamon from different countries, and a sealed jar of long pepper (pippali) that is claimed to be over 60 years old, acquired from an Ayurvedic physician’s estate in Thrissur. The rarest piece, Namboothiri says, is a small vial of “Vanilla Tahitensis” from French Polynesia, brought by a neighbour who worked on a cruise ship.
Word of the achievement has turned the modest home into an unlikely tourist attraction, with schoolchildren, food enthusiasts, and documentary filmmakers arriving from across Kerala. Namboothiri’s wife, Saradha, who has patiently lived with 11,000 jars for three decades, said she was “very proud” but gently noted that “there is no more room in the house.”
Namboothiri said he has no plans to stop collecting. His next target is to reach 12,000 jars from 100 countries by the time he turns 75.
