Sümela Monastery

Sümela Monastery clings to a sheer cliff on Mount Mela (Karadağ), about 1,200 metres above sea level, above the forested gorge of the Altındere valley in the Pontic Mountains behind Trabzon. From below it looks less like a building than a pale stripe of walls, windows and balconies stuck to the rock face, and the whole complex is shaped by that setting: rooms, chapels and terraces are packed onto a narrow ledge, fed in the past by an aqueduct that brought water along the cliff.

Tradition holds that the monastery was founded around 386, in the reign of Theodosius I, by two Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronius, who came here with an icon of the Virgin believed to have been painted by Saint Luke. The monastery was dedicated to the Virgin — Panagia Soumela in Greek — and took on its present form in the thirteenth century, when the Empire of Trebizond flourished on this coast; Emperor Alexios III Komnenos was among its patrons. The monks stayed through Ottoman times and left only in 1923, in the population exchange between Turkey and Greece. The famous icon went to Greece, where a new monastery of Panagia Soumela on Mount Vermio now keeps it.

The treasure of the site is its painted rock church, a cave chapel enclosed by later walls, whose surfaces are crowded with frescoes of saints and biblical scenes in overlapping layers, from works of the era of Alexios III to paintings of the early eighteenth century in the adjoining chapel. Many faces have been scratched and marked by graffiti over the decades of abandonment, and the wooden parts of the complex burned in 1930, but the colours that survive, set against raw rock, make the chapel one of the most atmospheric Byzantine interiors in Anatolia. Since 2010 an Orthodox liturgy for the feast of the Dormition has again been celebrated here once a year, on 15 August. Restoration works between 2015 and 2019 stabilised the cliff and uncovered a previously unknown tunnel.

Getting there

The monastery lies in Altındere Valley National Park in the Maçka district of Trabzon Province, roughly 47–50 km south of Trabzon; Gümüşhane is about 30 km away in a straight line across the mountains. Trabzon Airport (TZX), about 36 km away, is the practical gateway. The road runs from Trabzon via the town of Maçka up the valley, and the final stretch to the entrance is a short walk of a few hundred metres up the slope.