The Most Beautiful Temples in Europe
12 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful temples in Europe are Karlskirche (Austria), Parthenon (Greece) and Ġgantija (Malta). The list covers 12 temples in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's sacred buildings span more than five thousand years without a break. Megalithic temples on Malta were raised before the pyramids of Giza, Greek and Roman builders turned the temple into a canon of columns and proportion, and Christian architects inherited that language and layered on Byzantine mosaic, Gothic vaulting and Baroque domes. Many of the finest temples here sit literally on top of one another, one faith building on the foundations of the last.
The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis, built in the fifth century BC for Athena, remains the reference point for classical architecture. The Maison Carrée in Nîmes is one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere, still standing complete with its portico and columns. Older than both, Ġgantija on Gozo is a pair of megalithic temples whose stone walls rank among the oldest freestanding structures in the world. Beneath the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome, a twelfth-century church sits above a fourth-century one, which in turn sits above Roman houses and a shrine to Mithras.
The later temples show how varied European devotion became. La Martorana in Palermo glows with twelfth-century Byzantine mosaics inside a Norman church. St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków holds Veit Stoss's carved Gothic altarpiece, and a trumpet call sounds from its taller tower every hour. Karlskirche in Vienna, vowed by Emperor Charles VI after a plague, pairs a great dome with two columns modelled on Trajan's Column. St Andrew's Church in Kyiv, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, crowns a hill above the Dnieper, and the Frauenkirche in Dresden, destroyed in 1945, was rebuilt and reconsecrated in 2005.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Karlskirche | Church building | Austria | |
| 2 | Parthenon | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 3 | Ġgantija | Archaeological site | Malta | ✓ |
| 4 | Basilica of San Clemente, Rome | Temple | Italy | |
| 5 | St Andrew's Church, Kyiv | Church building | Ukraine | |
| 6 | Maison Carrée | Temple | France | ✓ |
| 7 | Frauenkirche, Dresden | Church building | Germany | |
| 8 | Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari | Church building | Italy | |
| 9 | Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 10 | La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo | Church building | Italy | ✓ |
| 11 | St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków | Church building | Poland | |
| 12 | Archbishop's Chapel, Ravenna | Church building | Italy | ✓ |
01 Karlskirche
Wiener Karlskirche
Austria · 0.7 km from Vienna48.198° N 16.372° E
Image by domeckopol from Pixabay What makes the Karlskirche unforgettable is the way it stitches together architectural quotations that should not fit. A Greek temple portico forms the entrance; on either side stand two free-standing columns wound with spiral reliefs in the manner of Trajan's Column in Rome, carved under Lorenzo Mattielli with scenes from the saint's life; beyond them, two low bell pavilions recall the Roman Baroque of Bernini and Borromini; and above everything rises a dome on a high drum. The columns carry a double meaning worked out by the court scholar Carl Gustav Heraeus: they echo Boaz and Jachin before Solomon's Temple and the Pillars of Hercules, the old emblem of Habsburg power.
Did you know? Part of the building cost was paid from a fine imposed on Hamburg after a mob there wrecked the chapel of the Austrian legation.
02 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay Whatever the explanation, the speed of construction is not in dispute: the temple went up in about fifteen years, from 447 to 432 BCE, under the architects Ictinus and Callicrates with the sculptor Phidias overseeing the decorative program, during the same burst of Athenian building under Pericles that reshaped the whole Acropolis.
Did you know? The 1687 explosion brought down six columns on the south side and eight on the north, along with about three-fifths of the frieze sculptures.
03 Ġgantija
Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vitold Muratov · CC BY-SA 4.0 What you see is a pair of temples built side by side and wrapped in a single boundary wall, plus the start of a third that never got beyond part of its façade. The southern temple is the larger, the older and the better preserved: five great apses, walls that still rise about six metres, and patches of the plaster that once covered the rough stone clinging between the blocks. Just inside the entrance is a big block with a hollow in it, often read as a basin for washing before worshippers went further in. Like Mnajdra on the main island, the complex faces south-east towards the equinox sunrise.
Did you know? The temple gave its name to a whole chapter of prehistory: the Ġgantija phase, roughly 3600–3200 BC, when Maltese temple building first took monumental form.
04 Basilica of San Clemente, Rome
Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano
Italy · 1.7 km from Rome41.889° N 12.498° E
Johann Rudolf Rahn · Public domain The deepest level holds foundations from before the Great Fire of AD 64, over which an industrial building — probably the imperial mint — and an apartment block were raised in the Flavian period. 6 metres long, its far end trimmed with pumice to suggest a cave, with an altar showing Mithras killing the bull. In the fourth century the site was filled in and a Christian basilica dedicated to Pope Clement I was built above; St Jerome mentioned it in 392. That lower church keeps one of the largest groups of early medieval wall paintings in Rome.
Did you know? The mithraeum was found in 1867, but groundwater flooding the lowest level delayed its proper investigation until 1914.
05 St Andrew's Church, Kyiv
Андріївська церква
Ukraine · 2.6 km from Kyiv50.459° N 30.518° E
Image by Adrian34 from Pixabay The church is compact rather than vast: about 32 metres long, 20 metres wide and some 50 metres high. A single large dome rises over the body of the church, accompanied by smaller decorative cupolas, and the whole stands on a high platform so that it seems to float above the slope. Inside, the iconostasis was also designed by Rastrelli and carved in Saint Petersburg, and more than a thousand sheets of gold leaf were used in the gilding. The church has no bells. The hill itself carries an older story: tradition holds that the Apostle Andrew climbed it, raised a cross and foretold that a great city would grow there.
Did you know? A first design by Gottfried Johann Schädel was rejected in 1745 before Rastrelli took over the project.
06 Maison Carrée
Maison carrée
France · 1 km from Nîmes43.838° N 4.356° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by pcdazero from Pixabay It was a temple of the imperial cult, dedicated or rededicated around 4 to 7 AD to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the grandsons and adopted heirs of Augustus, who both died young. The bronze letters of the dedication were pulled off in the Middle Ages, but in 1758 the local scholar Jean-François Séguier reconstructed the text from the pattern of holes left by their fixing pins. 5 metres, and puts its weight on a deep front porch taking up almost a third of its length. Six Corinthian columns carry the pediment, and twenty more are half-embedded in the walls of the cella; a frieze of rosettes and acanthus runs round three sides.
Did you know? The reconstructed dedication honoured Gaius Caesar as consul and Lucius Caesar as consul-designate, calling both princes of youth.
07 Frauenkirche, Dresden
Frauenkirche
Germany · 0.6 km from Dresden51.052° N 13.742° E
Image by Pauline_17 from Pixabay The church survived the Prussian bombardment of 1760 but not the Allied raids of February 1945. It withstood two nights of firestorm, long enough for about 300 people sheltering in the crypt to be evacuated, before the heated sandstone piers failed and the dome collapsed on the morning of 15 February. For nearly half a century the blackened heap of stone was left in Neumarkt as a memorial against war, and from 1982 it became a gathering place for the silent candlelit protests of Dresden's peace movement.
Did you know? When the foundation stone was laid on 26 August 1726, a copy of the Augsburg Confession, the core Lutheran statement of faith, was placed inside it.
08 Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.437° N 12.326° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The friars were given land here in the 1230s. Their first church soon proved too small, and the present building was begun in the first half of the 14th century and took more than a hundred years to finish; it was consecrated in 1492 to the Assumption of the Virgin. It is a fine example of Venetian Gothic: walls of red brick, white Istrian stone for the details, round columns and tall ribbed vaults rather than a dome. Inside, a carved marble choir screen of 1475 still separates the friars' stalls from the nave, the last such screen in place in any Venetian church, and a tall brick campanile completed in 1396 rises beside the apse.
Did you know? The Frari keeps the only medieval choir screen still standing in a Venetian church, carved in 1475.
09 Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae
Ναός Επικούριου Απόλλωνα
Greece37.430° N 21.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean Housen · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple was raised by the people of nearby Phigalia in the second half of the 5th century BC and dedicated to Apollo Epikourios, Apollo the Helper. The traveller Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, tied the title to the god's help against a plague during the Peloponnesian War and named the architect as Iktinos, the designer of the Parthenon. Modern scholars treat that attribution with caution, but they agree the building is one of the most inventive of its age. Hemmed in by the slope, it faces north rather than east, with a side door that may have let morning light fall on the cult image.
Did you know? The temple holds the earliest known Corinthian capital, crowning a single column inside the cella.
10 La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo
Chiesa della Martorana
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.115° N 13.363° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
GiorgioGaleotti · CC BY-SA 4.0 George, a Christian from Syria, began the church around 1143, the date of its foundation charter in Greek and Arabic, and it was finished before his death in 1151; he and his wife were buried in its narthex. The original building was a compact Byzantine cross-in-square with three apses, soon extended by a narthex, a forecourt and a western bell tower with three tiers of arched openings that still serves as the entrance.
Did you know? Two columns at the entrance carry Kufic inscriptions, one quoting the Quran and the other the basmala, inside a Christian church.
More about La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo →
11 St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków
Kościół archiprezbiterialny pw. Wniebowzięcia Najświętszej Marii Panny w Krakowie
Poland · 1.4 km from Kraków50.062° N 19.939° E
Image by krystianwin from Pixabay A church stood here by the 1220s; it was destroyed during the Mongol invasion, and a new early Gothic building rose on its foundations around 1290–1300. Under King Casimir the Great, with money from the wealthy burgher Mikołaj Wierzynek, it was rebuilt between 1355 and 1365 with a lengthened chancel and tall windows, and the nave was vaulted in the 1390s by Nicholas Wernher of Prague. The northern tower, about 80 metres high, served as the city's watchtower; its spire dates from 1478 and the gilded crown on top from 1666.
Did you know? The gilded crown placed on the taller tower's spire in 1666 measures about 2.4 metres across.
12 Archbishop's Chapel, Ravenna
Cappella Arcivescovile
Italy · 1.9 km from Ravenna44.416° N 12.198° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
GFreihalter · CC BY-SA 3.0 The tiny chapel is laid out as a Greek cross, entered through a narrow vestibule. Its lower walls are faced with marble and porphyry, while the upper surfaces and vaults shimmer with mosaic. Above the entrance Christ appears as a young, beardless warrior in armour, a cross over his shoulder, trampling a lion and a serpent: an image read as a pointed answer to the Arian court. The barrel vault of the vestibule is filled with birds and flowers, and in the main space four white-robed archangels hold up a medallion with the monogram of Christ, surrounded by the winged symbols of the four Evangelists.
Did you know? It is regarded as the only early Christian private oratory that has survived to the present day.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful temples in Europe?
- On our list, Karlskirche (Austria) ranks first, followed by Parthenon (Greece) and Ġgantija (Malta).
- Which country has the most temples in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (4), Greece (2) and Austria (1).
- What is the oldest temple in Europe?
- The megalithic temples of Malta, including Ġgantija on Gozo, are among the oldest. Ġgantija dates to around 3600 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza.
- Why does the Dresden Frauenkirche have dark stones?
- The church collapsed after the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. When it was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005, original stones recovered from the ruins were set back in their former positions, and their weathered dark colour stands out against the new sandstone.
- What is under the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome?
- Below the twelfth-century basilica lies an earlier church from the fourth century, and below that are first-century Roman buildings, including a temple to the god Mithras.
- How many temples are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 12 temples in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 4.