ISKCON Toronto (Hare Krishna Temple)ISKCON ਟੋਰਾਂਟੋ, ਹਰੇ ਕ੍ਰਿਸ਼ਨ ਮੰਦਰ

Stand on Avenue Road in midtown Toronto and the building in front of you tells two stories at once. Its grey stone tower, tall Gothic windows and crenellated top belong to an 1899 Presbyterian church, yet the green sign on the tower reads Hare Krishna, and inside, before an altar of Radha and Krishna, priests offer sweet rice every morning to a deity whose name remembers a theft of love in an Odisha temple town. The Hare Krishna Temple at 243 Avenue Road, known to its devotees as New Remuna Dhama, is ISKCON Toronto: one of Canada's largest Hare Krishna places of worship, and the clearest example in the country of a historic church given a second life as a Hindu temple.

What is ISKCON Toronto?

ISKCON Toronto is the Hare Krishna temple at 243 Avenue Road in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at the corner of Roxborough Avenue. It belongs to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Gaudiya Vaishnava movement founded in New York City in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and its temple is the former Avenue Road Church. The presiding deities are Sri Sri Radha Ksira-Chora Gopinatha, and the temple is also called New Remuna Dhama after Remuna in Odisha, home of the original Ksira-Chora Gopinatha. From this one address the community runs daily worship, festivals through the Vaishnava year and the city's great summer chariot festival. Canada's other ISKCON bookend is ISKCON Vancouver in Burnaby.

How did a Presbyterian church become a Krishna temple?

The building was designed in the Gothic Revival style by the Toronto firm Gordon and Helliwell and built in 1899 as the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Renamed Avenue Road Presbyterian around 1908, it followed its congregation into the United Church of Canada in 1925. After years standing vacant, the evangelist Charles Templeton rented it in 1941 for a hundred dollars a month and built an independent congregation there; fire badly damaged it in 1944, and donations from across Canada and the United States paid for the repairs. It later passed to the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Church of the Nazarene, and the preacher A. W. Tozer held his last pastorate here from 1959 to 1963. In the mid 1970s that congregation left downtown to found Bayview Glen Church in Thornhill. The sale of the old church to a buyer representing a Hare Krishna group stirred controversy at the time, and a demolition permit was denied; ISKCON bought the building around 1976, and the denied demolition is the reason the 1899 church still stands, as a temple.

The deities of New Remuna Dhama

The heart of the temple is older than its Avenue Road home. Sri Sri Radha Ksira-Chora Gopinatha were installed in 1972 in a small temple on Gerrard Street, and the temple's own telling says Prabhupada named them after the famous Gopinatha of Remuna in Odisha. In the tradition devotees retell, ksira means sweet rice and chora means thief: the Remuna deity is remembered for hiding a pot of sweet rice for his devotee, the saint Madhavendra Puri, and so earning the name of the one who stole sweet rice. The story is not decoration in Toronto. The temple says sweet rice has been offered on its altar every day since the deities were named in the early 1970s, an annual Sweet Rice Festival celebrates the tale, and Radhastami, the appearance day of Radharani, doubles as the anniversary of the deities' 1972 installation, marked with a special flower outfit darshan and gifts opened before Radharani.

What happens at the temple through the year?

The day at Avenue Road begins before dawn: the temple has long broadcast its Mangala Arati, the first ceremony of the morning, from 4:30. Through the day the altar cycle of darshan, offerings and aratis continues in the Gaudiya Vaishnava pattern, with evening programmes, classes and kirtan, congregational chanting, drawing the city's devotees after work. Sundays bring the community together in force, and the festival calendar carries the year: Janmashtami for Krishna's birth, Radhastami for Radharani's appearance, Gaura Purnima and the other great days of the tradition, each filling the old church hall with garlands, music and prasadam, food offered to the deities and then shared. It is worship in a distinctly Toronto key: a congregation of Caribbean, Indian, Punjabi and Western devotees in a Presbyterian shell, following a calendar from Bengal and Odisha.

The chariot festival that takes over Yonge Street

Once each summer the temple leaves its stone walls and takes the city. Its Ratha Yatra, today called Chariot Fest and long known as the Festival of India, is among Toronto's longest running multicultural summer events: in July 2026 it reached its 54th annual edition. Devotees pull great wooden chariots carrying Jagannath, the Lord of the Universe, down Yonge Street with music and chanting, and the celebration then crosses by ferry to Centre Island, where a free festival of kirtan, yoga, theatre, artisan stalls and a free vegetarian feast runs across the weekend. The festival is the public face of ISKCON Toronto, the day the temple introduces itself to tens of thousands of Torontonians at once, much as the deity's own festival does at Jagannath Puri in Odisha, the home of the Ratha Yatra tradition.

Visiting ISKCON Toronto

The temple stands at 243 Avenue Road, on the northeast corner of Roxborough Avenue in midtown Toronto, a short walk from Davenport Road and the Yorkville shops. It is open daily from early morning, and entry is free; come for a morning or evening arati to see the altar at worship, or on a festival day for the building at its fullest. Visitors are guests in a working temple and a heritage building at once: dress modestly, remove footwear where asked, and take time to look at the Gothic Revival stonework that two faiths have now prayed inside. A Toronto temple day can join this visit with the carved stone BAPS Mandir in Etobicoke and Brampton's community built Hindu Sabha Mandir, the three founding forms of the Hindu temple in the Greater Toronto Area.