The ancient monastery hanging from the side of a cliff

By Joe Yogerst, CNN

(CNN) — If its ancient walls could talk, Sümela Monastery in eastern Turkey would have quite a few stories to tell.

Since its founding in the 4th-century CE by some of the earliest Christians to arrive 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 an almost miraculous resurrection in modern times.

Even more alluring than Sümela’s tumultuous history is a location that seems generated by artificial intelligence or computer graphics rather than a real place — chapels, courtyards, library, living quarters, bell tower, aqueduct and a stone-enclosed sacred spring precariously perched on a rocky ledge nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) 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 — make their way along a cobblestone path to the monastery. Another draw is the fact that Sümela is on UNESCO’s tentative list for designation as a world heritage site.

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 inflicted by fires, treasure hunters, vandals and unruly visitors.

“We’ve always had a problem with falling rocks,” says Levent Alniak, manager of museums and historic sites for Trabzon province. “To prevent damage to the structures and harm to visitors, we had industrial mountain-climbers secure the cliff.” Dangling in midair, the climbers used steel cables and huge metal stakes to affix steel mesh netting and barriers to the towering rockface above the monastery.

The ongoing restoration yielded unexpected treasures such as a secret tunnel leading to a previously undiscovered 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.

Bringing frescoes back to life

Renewal of the monastery’s exquisite frescoes is ongoing, a multiyear project that involves meticulous, labor-intensive work by art restoration experts. During the summer season when it’s dry enough to undertake the delicate task, visitors can get a close-up look at the restorers removing graffiti and other damage inflicted after the monastery was uninhabited and unprotected between the 1920s and 1960s.

“For many years there wasn’t 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 facade of Sümela’s incredible Rock Church. “People wrote their names and other things across the frescos that we are trying to remove by painting over the graffiti with a style and colors similar to what the original artists used.”

As impressive as the exterior frescoes might be, they pale in comparison to the even older images inside. Behind its façade, the church disappears inside a large 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 gouged out on many of the lower frescoes, those within easy reach of human hands. Some have claimed the images were deliberately defaced by Muslims.

But Öznur Doksöz, who’s been guiding visitors to Sümela since the 1980s when it first opened to the public, says there’s another possible explanation. “The Virgin Mary is a holy person for the Muslim people also. So the people who live around here came and scratched their faces, especially the eyes, boiled the 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.”

Sümela’s fabled and historic roots

Meanwhile, nobody knows for sure if the monastery’s origin story is true or merely myth.

According to the legend, Sümela traces its roots to 386 CE and a miraculous discovery by Greek monks Barnabas and Sophronios. They were drawn to the remote area by a vision during which the Virgin Mary told them about an icon painted by Luke the Apostle hidden somewhere in the Pontic Alps. The monks eventually discovered the sacred relic — a dark portrait of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus which they christened the Panagia Soumela — in the cave that would later house the Rock Church.

The cave remained a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of years. It wasn’t 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.

Even though 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 change a church into a mosque, like Hagia Sofia in Istanbul,” Alniak explains. “But most of the time, they left the Christians to do their religion.” And they even supported some of the more important Christian sites. “The sultans considered Sümela a sacred place and helped the monastery by giving the monks donations 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, the empire’s ethnic Turks and Greeks 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 nearby Black Sea coast chose to relocate to Greece, including the monks of Sümela Monastery. Fearing they would be robbed during their journey to Greece, the monks buried the monastery treasures at 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 searching for those precious objects. The Panagia Soumela was eventually recovered by the monks and is now housed inside 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 decades that followed, access was improved to ease visits by tourists and pilgrims.

A watershed moment in the monastery’s resurrection came on August 15, 2010, on the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, when the Archbishop of Constantinople conducted the first Orthodox worship service at Sümela in 88 years. The ceremony is now repeated every August 15, although faithful are allowed to pray throughout the year in the monastery chapels.

Visiting Sümela today

Sümela Monastery is situated in Altındere Valley National Park about an hour’s drive south of Trabzon, a resort city on Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coast.

Visitors can drive themselves or join guided van and minibus tours 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 finally steps leading up to the monastery entrance.

Admission to the site is 20 euros or 60 Turkish lira. The monastery is open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. between June and September; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. between October and May. A short film about the renovation is screened in one of the old monk’s cells. Expect to spend one to two hours exploring the site.

Just outside the entrance gate are a small shop with snacks and souvenirs, vending machines, outdoor tables and restrooms.

Visitors should wear sturdy shoes and dress for the weather, the possibility of rain during the warmer months and snow during the winter.

Trabzon is around a 13-hour drive from Istanbul but less than two hours by air. Turkish Airlines flies 10 times daily from Istanbul to Trabzon and vice versa.

Coşandere village offers the closest accommodation to the monastery, including the three-star Sümela Holiday Hotel. There’s a much wider range of overnight possibilities in Trabzon like the seaside Ramada Plaza and the hilltop Radisson Blu.

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