dating from the early first to the middle of the fourth century AD, was later transformed into a church. It could well be that the fire temple, with its domed square on four pillars, inspired the centrally planned, domed church that is so typical of the later Christian-Armenian architecture.

Fig. 163 – A map of the fire temple in the city of Ani, which was excavated in the 1909 season by the controversial linguist and archaeologist Nikolai Marr. The Turkish troops looted and smashed the place in the years after the First World War in order to destroy the Armenian heritage and its associated nationalism. A re-excavation took place between 1998-1999 by Turkish archaeologists.

Another temple devoted to an element in a complete different time and place is the ‘Templeof the Earth’ as envisaged by the German artist Hugo Hoepner (1868 – 1948), also known as Fidus (fig. 164/165). This non-conformist artist designed several theosophical temples, which had obvious references to the Wagnerian spirit and used imagery related to the Freemasons. He wrote in an essay in 1912 that ‘our future temples will be the wonderful expressions of our universal feelings and experiences.’ The ‘Temple of the Earth’ was never built, but its ideas – concocted from Zarathustrian sources, also known to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) – are still visible.

Fig. 164 – The Temple of the Earth – or ‘Tempel der Erde’ – was conceived by Hugo Hoepner (Fidus) in 1895. He used the idea of the ‘Cube of Zoroaster’ with its emphasis on