Garni is a magnificent oddity. In a country whose identity is bound up with the oldest Christianity in the world, a pagan Greco-Roman colonnaded temple survives here, the only one left standing in the entire Caucasus. Built in the 1st century AD, probably dedicated to Mihr, the Armenian sun god, it stands with its Ionic columns on the edge of a basalt gorge, in a scene that looks transplanted from the Mediterranean to the mountains of Armenia.
The temple escaped Christianisation because, it is believed, it became a summer residence for the kings and a secular place. An earthquake brought it down in 1679, and for almost three centuries it lay as a heap of stones scattered along the edge of the canyon, until in Soviet times, between 1969 and 1975, it was rebuilt piece by piece using the same original stones, in a celebrated anastylosis. Today it stands whole again, elegant and solitary, above one of the most impressive landscapes in the country.
This guide helps you visit Garni in a practical way: how to get there from Yerevan, how much the entrance costs, what to look at in the temple and in the Roman bath complex with its mosaic, how to get down into the gorge to see the Symphony of Stones —that natural organ of basalt columns— and how to combine it with Geghard monastery. It is one of the most complete and surprising trips around the capital.
The temple of Garni was built in the 1st century AD, probably by King Tiridates I around the year 77, as a pagan sanctuary dedicated to the sun god Mihr, on a site that had already been a fortress since Urartian and Hellenistic times. Greco-Roman in style, with Ionic columns, it is the only temple of its kind surviving in the region. When Armenia became Christian in 301, most pagan sanctuaries were destroyed, but Garni was spared by becoming a summer residence for the royal family. A devastating earthquake brought it down in 1679, and its stones lay scattered until, between 1969 and 1975, it was rebuilt with the original materials. Next to the temple are remains of the royal fortress, palaces and a Roman-style bath with a remarkable mosaic. The whole complex overlooks the gorge of the Azat River, famous for its basalt columns known as the Symphony of Stones. The story of this only surviving pagan temple is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historical and spiritual heart of Armenia: the pink capital born from the Urartian fortress of Erebuni, the mother cathedral of Etchmiadzin, the pagan temple of Garni, the rock-cut monastery of Geghard and Khor Virap, where the conversion of the world's first Christian country began.
Read the history of Yerevan and its surroundings →They depart from Erevan, 21 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the temple that makes it famous today was built, Garni was already a place of power. Its site — a rocky spur surrounded on three sides by the deep gorge of the Azat River — was a natural, almost impregnable defensive position, and so it was fortified from very early times. A cuneiform inscription found on the site, left by the Urartian king Argishti I (the same king who founded Erebuni, the future Yerevan, in 782 BC), mentions the conquest of this region. This shows that there was already an important settlement here in the Iron Age.
Over time, Garni became one of the royal fortresses of the Kingdom of Armenia. The kings of the Orontid dynasty, and later the Artaxiads, used it as a stronghold and as a residence. From its position it overlooked the valley and controlled the roads of the area. Its walls of large basalt blocks, fitted together without mortar and held with iron clamps, closed off the only land access to the promontory.
Around the turn of the era, when Armenia was caught between the orbit of Rome and that of Parthian Persia, Garni enjoyed its greatest splendour. The Armenian kings, who culturally straddled the Hellenistic and Iranian worlds, turned it into a luxurious summer residence, with palaces, baths and gardens overlooking the canyon. And it was in this setting that the monument that would outlast everything else was born.
The temple of Garni was built in the 1st century AD, and most scholars attribute it to King Tiridates I of Armenia, around the year 77 AD. Some even link it to the gold that the king is said to have brought back from Rome. Tiridates I travelled in person to the imperial capital to be crowned by Emperor Nero in a lavish ceremony, and on his return he began major building projects. The temple is in pure Greco-Roman style, with nine steps, Ionic columns, a triangular pediment and rich reliefs. It looks as if it came straight from the Mediterranean, and yet it stands in the mountains of Armenia.
Which god was it dedicated to? The most widely accepted theory is that it was a sanctuary to Mihr (or Mithra), the Armenian god of the sun and light, related to the Persian Mithra and to the Roman cult of Mithras. The building's orientation and tradition both point that way. It was therefore a pagan temple, built in an Armenia that still worshipped a pantheon of gods with Iranian and Hellenistic roots, two centuries before the country embraced Christianity.
Today Garni is truly one of a kind: the only peristyle temple (one surrounded by columns) from the Greco-Roman period still standing anywhere in the Caucasus or in the territory of the former Soviet Union. Its survival makes it a unique record of pre-Christian Armenia, a country that for centuries was a cultural bridge between the classical Western world and the Iranian world of the East.
In 301, Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, under King Tiridates III and Saint Gregory the Illuminator. The new faith was imposed vigorously, and one of its first tasks was to wipe out the pagan sanctuaries. Temples, statues and idols of the old gods were destroyed all over the country, and churches were built on top of many of them. The memory of pagan Armenia was almost erased from the landscape.
Garni, however, was spared. The most widely accepted explanation is that the temple stopped being used for worship and became part of the royal palace complex as a secular pavilion. According to some sources, it became the summer residence of the king's sister, Khosrovidukht. Once it lost its sacred character and became a civil building, it escaped the destruction that Christianisation brought to its sister temples. It is one of the great ironies of Armenian history: the only pagan temple that survives did so precisely by ceasing to be a temple.
Over the following centuries, Garni remained in use as a fortress and residence throughout the Middle Ages, under the various powers that ruled Armenia. The remains of that long occupation survive next to the temple: the foundations of the royal palaces, the walls and, above all, the 3rd-century Roman-style bathhouse. It has underfloor heating and a delicate Hellenistic mosaic on a mythological theme, one of the few that survive in the country. All of this speaks of more than a thousand years of continuous life on the same promontory.
The temple's history took a brutal turn on 4 June 1679. That day a devastating earthquake struck the whole Yerevan region, causing enormous damage and killing thousands of people in the area. At Garni, the quake brought down the temple that had stood for more than fifteen hundred years. Its columns, pediment and walls collapsed onto the platform and down the side of the canyon, leaving a chaotic heap of scattered stones. The same earthquake ruined other monuments nearby, such as the neighbouring monastery of Havuts Tar.
For almost three centuries, Garni stayed like this: a field of fallen blocks on the edge of the abyss, a melancholy relic that caught the interest of European travellers and scholars from the 19th century onwards. Some of them drew and described the ruins. Little by little, people came to realise that a unique archaeological treasure lay there, the only classical temple in the Caucasus, waiting to be raised again.
Serious study of the site began with the archaeological excavations of the 20th century. They uncovered not only the fallen temple but also the Urartian walls, the palaces, the Roman bathhouse and its mosaic. The archaeologists found that most of the original blocks were still there, scattered but identifiable. This gave rise to an ambitious and controversial idea: rebuilding the whole temple by putting every stone back in its place.
Between 1969 and 1975, in the middle of the Soviet era, the temple of Garni rose again. It was rebuilt using a technique called anastylosis. Archaeologists and architects led by the specialist Alexander Sahinian put the genuine blocks that had survived the earthquake back in their original positions, using new stone only for the parts that were lost for good, and making that new stone clearly distinguishable. It was one of the great monument restorations of the 20th century, and thanks to it we can see the whole temple today, with most of its original masonry standing.
The reconstruction carried strong symbolic weight. In a Soviet Armenia that was officially atheist, bringing back the only surviving trace of classical, pre-Christian Armenia was a way of asserting the antiquity and continuity of the Armenian nation and its place among the great ancient civilisations. Garni became an emblem of identity, and ever since it has been one of the most visited and best-loved places in the country.
Today the temple of Garni is the centrepiece of an archaeological site that includes the fortress, the palaces and the bathhouse with its mosaic. All of it overlooks the dizzying Azat gorge and its 'Symphony of Stones', a wall of basalt columns. Combined with the nearby medieval monastery of Geghard, it makes one of the most rewarding day trips in Armenia. In just a few kilometres it takes in pagan and Christian Armenia, the Hellenistic and the medieval, the work of people and the work of nature. Few places tell you so much about a country in so little space.
