The Great Temple Trail

Deep in the southern state of Tamil Nadu is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Great Living Chola Temples that make for an amazing study in architecture and offer a reminder of the dynasty’s 1,500-year-long reign.

- ANUBHUTI KRISHNA

OF ALL THE TEMPLES I have visited, I am partial to those in South India—towering stone structures standing amid fluorescent paddy fields, surrounded by swaying coconut palms. It is this personal bias that took me on a quest to discover the Chola Temples in Tamil Nadu on a hot summer week in 2019. I had learned about the Great Living Chola Temples a few months earlier, while roaming another temple complex in the southern state. That morning, when my guide had told me about the group of three temples that constituted a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I had resolved to come back to experience them for myself. And so here I am, on a stuffy June morning, waiting to step inside one of the largest temple complexes in the world.