Garni Temple

A first-century CE Hellenistic temple on a basalt promontory above the Azat River gorge, Garni is the only standing Greco-Roman colonnaded structure in the former Soviet Union. The Ionic peristyle temple was built by King Tiridates I and survived Christianization by serving as a royal summer residence, though it was largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1679 and reconstructed in the 1970s. The gorge below the promontory exposes an extraordinary natural formation of hexagonal basalt columns — the Basalt Symphony — visible from the canyon floor.