Sri Meenakshi Temple – The Taj Mahal of south India

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This enormous hindu temple complex is the summit of south Indian religious architecture, as important to south India as the Taj Mahal is for North India. Built in 1560 for god Shiva and his wife Parvati, the most impressive about it are the 12 gopurams (towers), where gods, demons and heroes pile up on top of each other.

As the Taj Mahal in Agra, the temple seems to be the guardian of the city, no matter from which street you are coming, you will always see one of the towers from a different angle…sometimes they are shown from the front, sometimes from the side.

The towers viewed from the street

One of the inner towers viewed from a pedestrian street inside the complex

But it’s just when you see the complex from above that you notice its magnitude: 12 towers looking over a 6 hectare complex, most of which is not accessible to tourist. What a shame!

The promenade around the courtyard is quite amazing, with nice paintings on the ceiling and on the floor. From the corridors you can also see the towers rising up and again the perspectives are always changing as you go around.

As in most temples in India, the columns are so close to each other (about 2m) that you get the impression that the room is longer than it actually is, almost infinite!

Arcade inside the complex

Inside the 1000 column temple

The columns have all different shapes, sometimes geometrical,

sometimes human, sometimes animal

Unfortunately we can’t find the famous musical stone pillars, since some of the temple has been recently closed to visitors. These pillars made from massive stone make different tones when hit them (But you need to have very strong wrists or fingers, it almost killed my hand when I tried at another temple, where I was not able to photograph or video film). This is how it looks like in other temples with similar columns: