Pundarikakshan Perumal Temple

Pundarikakshan Perumal Temple or Thiruvellarai in Thiruvellarai, a village in the outskirts of Tiruchirappalli in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. Constructed in the Dravidian style of architecture, the temple is glorified in the Divya Prabandha, the early medieval Tamil canon of the Azhwar saints from the 6th–9th centuries AD. It is one of the 108 Divyadesam dedicated to Vishnu, who is worshipped as Pundarikakshan and his consort Lakshmi as Pankajavalli.According to legends, the temple is said to have been built by Sibi Chakravarthy, king of Ayodhya in Treta Yuga 15 lakh years ago. This temple is older than Srirangam temple.The temple has three inscriptions in its two rock-cut caves, two dating from the period of Nandivarman II (732–796 AD) and the other to that of Dantivarman (796–847). It also has Pallava sculptural depictions of Narasimha and Varaha, two of the ten avatars of Vishnu.A granite wall surrounds the temple, enclosing all its shrines and six of its seven bodies of water. The rajagopuram, the temple's gateway tower, is unfinished. A swastika shaped temple tank built in 800 AD by Kamban Araiyan during the reign of Dantivarman is outside the temple complex. The Vijayanagar and Nayak kings commissioned paintings on the walls of the shrine of Pudarikakshan, some of which are still present.