Garni Temple

Garni is a classical temple on a triangular promontory above a gorge, some thirty kilometres east of Yerevan in Armenia. It is the only standing building in the Greco-Roman colonnaded style in Armenia and the former Soviet Union. It is generally dated to the first century CE and attributed, traditionally, to King Tiridates I of Armenia, a member of the Iranian Arsacid dynasty, who was crowned in Rome by Nero.

Its dedication is uncertain. Many scholars and many Armenians believe it was a temple to the sun god Mihr, the Armenian form of the Iranian Mithra, which is why it figures on our Atlas; others have proposed that it was built as a tomb. After Armenia's conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, the temple survived, perhaps as a royal summer house, within a fortress that also held a palace and a bathhouse with a mosaic floor.

In 1679 an earthquake brought the temple down. Its stones lay scattered until the Soviet period, when it was reconstructed between 1969 and 1975, using original blocks wherever they survived and new, plainer stone for the gaps. Visitors climb nine high steps to a portico of Ionic columns. Below the promontory, in the gorge, the basalt columns of the cliffs, known as the Symphony of Stones, look like the pipes of an organ.