Kailasa Temple

The Kailasa Temple is a monolithic Hindu temple at the Ellora Caves complex in Maharashtra, India, dedicated to Shiva and carved as cave sixteen among the site's larger group of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rock-cut monuments. Rather than being built up from separate stones, the entire temple, including its shrine, courtyard, subsidiary shrines and freestanding sculpted elephants and columns, was excavated downward and inward out of a single basalt cliff face. Commissioned in the eighth century, most likely under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, the project is estimated to have required the removal of some 200,000 tonnes of rock. It is considered the largest single monolithic rock excavation in the world and, together with the rest of the Ellora Caves, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.