What to expect
Highlights
- Durga Temple, Aihole — The most celebrated temple of Aihole — an apsidal, gallery-wrapped 7th- to 8th-century shrine (its name comes from the durga, or fort, beside it, not the goddess) whose carved niches of Durga, Vishnu, Shiva and Harihara are landmarks of early Chalukyan sculpture.
- Lad Khan Temple — One of the earliest experimental temples at Aihole — a low, flat-roofed pillared hall of the 5th to 7th centuries that borrowed its plan from timber assembly-halls, later occupied by a Muslim named Lad Khan whose name stuck; a keystone in the study of how the Indian temple evolved.
- Aihole Archaeological Museum — The ASI museum beside the Durga temple complex, displaying Chalukyan sculpture, hero-stones and inscriptions gathered from Aihole’s 120-odd temples — a useful orientation to the "cradle of Indian temple architecture".
