On Diwali eve Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina inaugurated a new 87-foot tower at the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Cary in front of hundreds of worshippers.
The “Tower of Unity and Prosperity” took 13 years to complete after the temple’s construction began in 2009. According to temple leaders, it is currently the highest structure of its sort in North America.
“What a wonderful day this is, especially in times of trouble… walking into this temple with reverence and leaving your worries on the outside for just a while… That’s something we all need to do, but then we can always leave the temple with even more determination than ever to address those worries, and to make sure we’re doing something about it,” Governor Cooper stated addressing the community, as reported by CBS17.
Lakshminarayanan Srinivasan, general secretary of the temple’s board of trustees, told Raleigh News & Observer, that approval for the tower was granted in 2019, and construction began in April 2020, “right at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic”.
Srinivasan stated that the “give a brick” campaign, which asked Indian-Americans from all around the nation to contribute whatever they could to see through the tower’s construction, raised about $2.5 million from more than 5,000 donors.
Additional ideas for expansion, according to Srinivasan, include the construction of an assembly hall next to the temple. He continued by saying that plans exist to construct fountains and a “manicured landscape” to encircle the shrine.
The temple is modeled after the famous Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, and is known to be the largest Hindu temple in North America.
Indian residents of the Triangle area of North Carolina began to demand in 1988 that the grandeur and intricately detailed artwork of South Indian temples be replicated there, and as a result, Sri Venkateswara Temple was constructed.
To hand-carve, the decorative Hindu idols for the temple out of cement, fourteen artisans were brought in from India.
Over 51,000 Indian-Americans lived in Wake County, North Carolina, and 57,000 in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties, according to census estimates from 2021.
