(CNN) – If its ancient walls could talk, the Sümela Monastery in eastern Turkey would have many stories to tell.
Since its founding in the 4th century by some of the first Christians who arrived along the Black Sea coast, the shrine has witnessed the evolution of the Roman Empire into the Byzantine era, the rise of the Ottomans, the struggle for Turkish independence after World War I, decades of vandalism and neglect, and a near-miraculous resurrection in modern times.
Even more compelling than Sümela’s tumultuous history is a location that seems generated by artificial intelligence or computer graphics rather than a real place: chapels, courtyards, a library, living quarters, a bell tower, an aqueduct and a sacred spring encased in stone, precariously perched on a rocky outcrop nearly 300 metres above a wooded river valley in the Pontic Alps.
Every day, thousands of visitors, some of them religious pilgrims but most drawn by the splendor of the early Christian frescoes and architecture that seems to defy gravity, walk along a cobbled path to the monastery. Another attraction is the fact that Sümela is on UNESCO’s tentative list for designation as a world heritage site.
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Now a state museum rather than an active religious community, the monastery has undergone years of meticulous restoration to make the site safe for tourism and mitigate damage caused by fires, treasure hunters, vandals and unruly visitors.
“We have always had a problem with falling rocks,” says Levent Alniak, manager of museums and historical sites in Trabzon province. “To prevent damage to structures and harm to visitors, we had industrial climbers securing the cliff.” Hanging in the air, the climbers used steel cables and huge metal stakes to attach steel mesh nets and barriers to the towering rock above the monastery.
The ongoing restoration has yielded unexpected treasures, such as a secret tunnel leading to a previously unknown chapel that may have been used as an observation post to defend the monastery. Inside the tiny church, archaeologists found dramatic frescoes depicting heaven and hell, and life and death.
The renovation of the monastery’s exquisite frescoes is ongoing, a multi-year project involving meticulous and laborious work by art restoration experts. During the summer season, when it is dry enough to undertake the delicate task, visitors can watch up close the restorers removing graffiti and other damage inflicted after the monastery was left uninhabited and unprotected between the 1920s and 1960s.
“For many years there was not enough control here and there was a lot of vandalism,” says restorer Senol Aktaş, taking a break from his work on an 18th-century fresco of the Virgin Mary conversing with an angel on the façade of the incredible Sümela Rock Church. “People wrote their names and other things on the frescoes which we are trying to remove by painting over the graffiti in a style and colours similar to those used by the original artists.”
Sümela hangs nearly 300 meters above the valley below. (Credit: CNN)
As impressive as the exterior frescoes may be, they pale in comparison to the even older images inside. Behind its façade, the church disappears into a vast cave filled with vibrant images created in the 13th century. Large portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary stare down from the ceiling, while the walls are reserved for angels, apostles and saints, including a rather graphic depiction of St. Ignatius being torn apart by lions in a Roman arena.
The painted eyes are torn out in many of the lower frescoes, those within reach of human hands. Some have claimed that the images were deliberately defaced by Muslims.
But Öznur Doksöz, who has been guiding visitors to Sümela since the 1980s when it was first opened to the public, says there is another possible explanation. “The Virgin Mary is a holy person for Muslims as well. So people living around here came and scraped their faces, especially their eyes, boiled paint chips and drank this water thinking it would bless them. We don’t know if this story is true or not, but that’s what people say.”
Meanwhile, no one knows for sure whether the story of the monastery’s origin is true or simply a myth.
According to legend, Sümela traces its roots back to 386 AD and a miraculous discovery by the Greek monks Barnabas and Sophronios. They were drawn to the remote area by a vision during which the Virgin Mary told them of an icon painted by the apostle Luke hidden somewhere in the Pontic Alps. The monks eventually discovered the holy relic, a dark portrait of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus which they christened the Panagia Soumela, in the cave that would later house the Church of the Rock.
The cave remained a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of years. It was not until the 13th century that the monastery as we know it today was founded by Orthodox monks during a period when the last Christian kingdom ruled the region. It continued to flourish under the Ottomans, who took control of the area in 1461.
Although they were Muslims, the Ottomans gave their subjects a surprising degree of religious freedom, as long as they were loyal to the emperor.
“Sometimes they would convert a church into a mosque, like Hagia Sophia in Istanbul,” Alniak explains. “But most of the time, they let the Christians practice their religion.” And they even supported some of the most important Christian sites. “The sultans considered Sümela a sacred place and helped the monastery by giving donations to the monks and more land,” he adds.
Sümela was popular with Christian and Muslim pilgrims, and an active Greek Orthodox monastery, until the early 20th century. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, ethnic Turks and Greeks of the empire fought a civil war that ended in 1923 with a massive population exchange between the Asian and European parts of the former empire.
Many of the Greeks living in the Pontic Alps and the nearby Black Sea coast chose to move to Greece, including the monks of the Sümela Monastery. Fearing that they would be robbed during their journey to Greece, the monks buried the monastery’s treasures in secret locations in the Altindere Valley, hoping to retrieve them at some point in the future.
The abandoned monastery became a magnet for treasure hunters looking for such precious objects. The Panagia Soumela was eventually recovered by the monks and is now housed within the Nea Sumela Monastery in northern Greece. However, some relics were smuggled out of Turkey and now reside in museums or private collections around the world.
By the 1970s, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched the first attempts to preserve and renovate Sümela as a national treasure. Over the following decades, access was improved to facilitate visits by tourists and pilgrims.
A decisive moment in the monastery’s resurrection came on August 15, 2010, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, when the Archbishop of Constantinople led the first Orthodox worship service at Sümela in 88 years. The ceremony is now repeated every August 15, although the faithful are welcome to pray year-round in the monastery’s chapels.
Sumela Monastery It is located in the Altındere Valley National Park, about an hour’s drive south of Trabzon, a resort city on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey.
Visitors can drive themselves or join guided tours in vans and minibuses to the monastery offered by travel agencies in Trabzon. From the parking lot, shuttle buses take visitors to the bottom of a steep path and eventually to the steps leading to the monastery entrance.
Entrance to the site costs 20 euros or 60 Turkish lira. The monastery is open from 8am to 7pm between June and September; 8am to 5pm between October and May. A short film about the renovation is shown in one of the monks’ former cells. Expect to spend one to two hours exploring the site.
Just outside the entrance gate is a small shop with snacks and souvenirs, vending machines, outdoor tables and restrooms.
Visitors should wear sturdy shoes and dress for the weather, with the possibility of rain during the warmer months and snow during the winter.
Trabzon is about 13 hours by car from Istanbul, but less than two hours by plane. Turkish Airlines flies 10 times a day from Istanbul to Trabzon and vice versa.
The village of Coşandere offers the closest accommodation to the monastery, including the three-star hotel Sumela Holiday HotelThere is a much wider range of accommodation options in Trabzon, such as Ramada Plaza next to the sea and the Radisson Blu on top of a hill.
