Garni Temple stands as the sole surviving Greco-Roman colonnaded temple in the former Soviet Union, its twenty-four Ionic columns rebuilt in the 1970s from rubble left by a 1679 earthquake. Commissioned in the first century CE by King Tiridates I and dedicated to Mihr, the Zoroastrian sun deity, the structure occupies a triangular headland above the Azat River gorge in Kotayk Province, sixty kilometers east of Yerevan. The basalt podium and the symmetry of the peristyle echo Hellenistic temple design, yet the dedication to a pre-Christian Armenian pantheon marks the temple as a hybrid monument — one foot in the Mediterranean architectural canon, the other in the ritual landscape of ancient Armenia. Khor Virap Garni Geghard tour itineraries pair the pagan temple with two Christian monasteries: Khor Virap, where Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for thirteen years before converting King Tiridates III in 301 CE, and Geghard, a fourth-century foundation carved partly into the cliffs of the upper Azat gorge. The tours run as full-day circuits from Yerevan, typically departing between eight and nine in the morning and returning by early evening. Most include a stop at Khor Virap first, where the snow-crowned cone of Mount Ararat dominates the southern horizon across the Turkish border, then proceed to Garni for midday light on the colonnade, and finish at Geghard, where the acoustics inside the rock-cut chapel draw pilgrims and choral groups alike. Some itineraries add a lavash-baking demonstration in Garni village or a wine-tasting detour to the Areni-1 cave complex in Vayots Dzor, extending the route southward. Garni itself reopened to the public in 1975 after a decade-long anastylosis project led by architect Alexander Sahinian, who used original fragments recovered from the gorge and replicated missing elements in matching basalt. The temple measures 17.5 by 11.7 meters on plan, with steps ascending the eastern facade toward the cella. A ruined Roman bathhouse with a geometric mosaic floor lies ninety meters southwest of the temple, and the remains of a medieval chapel and a fourteenth-century fortification wall trace the edges of the plateau. The site operates daily from nine in the morning until half past nine in the evening; a conservation fee of 1,500 Armenian dram applies to foreign visitors. The access path from the car park involves nine steps. The Khor Virap Garni Geghard tour format appeals to visitors seeking a compressed introduction to Armenia's layered religious history — pagan, early Christian, medieval monastic — within a single day's driving radius of the capital. The three sites occupy distinct topographic settings: Khor Virap on the Ararat plain, Garni on a gorge promontory, Geghard within a narrow canyon. Collectively, they anchor the narrative arc that Armenian heritage marketing frames as the journey from Hellenistic periphery to Apostolic heartland, a trajectory encoded in stone across seventeen centuries.