BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir - Lilburn, GA
Posted by: 
Thorny1
N 33° 53.134 W 084° 09.822
16S E 762317 N 3753090
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir located in Lilburn, GA.
Waymark Code: WM48R2
Location: Georgia, United States
Date Posted: 07/22/2008
Views: 179
Sitting like a wedding cake atop a mound of red clay in the suburb of Lilburn is the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple that shares an intersection with a Publix supermarket and a Walgreens pharmacy.
The exterior is a confection of creamy hand-carved limestone and sparkling Italian Carrara marble. Pink sandstone decorates the interior spaces.
When this building, topped with red-and-white flags to ward off evil, opened for worship it was officially one of the largest Hindu temples in the world.
The stone for the project was shipped piece by piece from India, where craftsmen had sculptured it into more than 500 designs including rosettes, leaves, feathers and lacy geometric patterns. The thousands of sections, ranging from five ounces to five tons, each with its own bar code, were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle based on instructions for religious buildings written into scripture thousands of years old.
Although the engineers said they had not counted the number of pieces they used, a mandir in London that served as a model for the Lilburn building required more than 26,000 individual parts.
The price tag for the project, $19 million, was kept down by the thousands of hours of volunteer labor donated by congregants of the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Clarkston, Ga. Hundreds of volunteers installed more than 50,000 plants for the landscaping.
The Temple is open daily from 9am - 6pm for visitors.
Visit Instructions:
Include in your log one or two complete sentences. Logs containing a few words like "visited it" are subject to deletion. Photos of the Hindu temple are strongly encouraged when permitted otherwise please refrain from taking pictures inside and in any case, generally have respect for the religious nature of the site.
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