Sri Azhagiya Manavalan Perumal Temple (Nachiyar Koil)

Thirukkoli is one of a small handful of Divya Desams (alongside Srivilliputhur and Thiruvellarai) where the goddess is given ritual precedence over Vishnu himself. During every festival procession here, Kamalavalli Nachiyar moves first and Azhagiya Manavala Perumal follows her, a reversal of the usual order at almost every other Vishnu temple. The temple also has no separate processional image (utsavar) of its own for Vishnu. Temple tradition holds that the Srirangam utsavar serves this role for Uraiyur as well, binding this shrine permanently to its far larger neighbour a few kilometres away.

Uraiyur's significance is not only devotional. Long before it became a Divya Desam, Uraiyur was the capital of the early Chola kings during the Sangam period (roughly 300 BCE–300 CE), a centre of trade in textiles, gems, beads and spices, governed by the assemblies and guilds that were characteristic of early Tamil polity. It is also the birthplace of Thiruppaan Alvar, one of the twelve Alvars, whose own hymns helped establish the Divya Desam tradition, giving this modest temple a double claim to antiquity, as both an early political capital and the origin point of one of the Naalayira Divya Prabandham's own authors.

According to temple tradition, the childless Chola king Nanda Chola was blessed by Vishnu with a daughter after years of devoted worship. While out hunting, the king is said to have discovered an infant girl inside a thousand-petalled lotus in a temple tank; because she was born of a lotus (kamalam), he named her Kamalavalli, and she is worshipped at this temple as an incarnation of Lakshmi herself. This legend gives the temple its local name, Nachiyar Koil, literally the "Temple of the Goddess."

Separate from the legend, the temple is generally dated to the late 8th century CE, built under the Medieval Cholas, with later structural and ritual contributions recorded from the Pandyas, the Vijayanagara empire and the Madurai Nayaks, a pattern of successive dynastic patronage similar to many of the major Chola Nadu Divya Desams. The temple's continuing link to Thiruppaan Alvar is marked each year: on his birth anniversary (jayanthi), the Srirangam Ranganathaswamy Temple performs a special Vishvarupa Darshanam, and the utsavar associated with Uraiyur is taken in ceremonial procession to Srirangam for the occasion, a living reminder of how closely the two temples' ritual calendars are intertwined.

The birth festival (jayanthi) of Thiruppaan Alvar is the temple's most distinctive annual observance, marked by a special Vishvarupa Darshanam of Ranganatha at the nearby Srirangam temple and a ceremonial procession connecting the two shrines. As at other female-precedence Divya Desams, festival processions here are structured around Kamalavalli Nachiyar leading and Azhagiya Manavala Perumal following.

Daily worship follows the customary schedule of the Chola Nadu Divya Desams, with rituals for Kamalavalli Nachiyar given particular prominence in keeping with the temple's female-precedence tradition.