Garni Temple
— — the column that outlasted the empire that raised it.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Greco-Roman temple on a basalt promontory above the Azat gorge, in the village of Garni east of Yerevan. Believed to have been built in the first century, likely under King Tiridates I, it is the only standing colonnaded peristyle building of the classical world left anywhere in the former Soviet space. An earthquake brought it down in 1679; Soviet archaeologists reassembled the original stones between 1969 and 1976. Below the temple, the gorge wall fans into the basalt columns Armenians call the Symphony of the Stones. — from the studio
Garni Temple, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Temple of Garni stands on a basalt promontory above the Azat River gorge, in Kotayk Province about 30 kilometres east of Yerevan. The site sits near 1,400 metres elevation, on a triangular plateau that has held a fortress since the Bronze Age. The Ionic-order peristyle is dated to the first century, traditionally to the reign of Tiridates I, and is the only Greco-Roman colonnaded building still standing in Armenia or the wider former Soviet world. A devastating earthquake collapsed it in 1679; the stones lay where they fell for nearly three centuries before the Soviet-era reconstruction (1969–1976) returned the temple to its plinth.
The temple is built of grey basalt quarried locally, with twenty-four Ionic columns set on a high podium reached by a steep flight of nine steps. The capitals carry the volutes and palmettes of a Hellenistic workshop, almost certainly cut by craftsmen working from Roman models. Reconstruction in the 1970s, led by architect Alexander Sahinian, used the original fallen blocks wherever possible and marked replacement stone in a deliberately plainer cut, so the eye reads the difference at close range. The wall of basalt columns beneath the gorge — the Symphony of the Stones — is the same volcanic rock, cooled into hexagonal pipes.
Garni is one of Armenia's most-visited sites and pairs naturally with the cave monastery of Geghard, about 10 kilometres further up the same valley. The fortress grounds are open daily, with a modest admission fee, and a path from the temple drops into the gorge to walk among the basalt columns. The drive from Yerevan takes under an hour by car or marshrutka. Early morning gives the temple alone and the basalt clean of glare; late afternoon throws the columns into long shadow on the plateau. Festival of the Vardavar, in midsummer, fills the village with water and visitors.