A 1,600-Year-Old Monastery Is Built Into a Cliff Nearly 1,000 Feet Above a Turkish Valley

High above a forested valley in northeastern Türkiye, an enormous stone monastery seems to grow directly out of a nearly vertical cliff. Sümela Monastery sits on the slopes of Karadağ in the Altındere Valley, south of Trabzon. The complex is roughly 300 meters, or 984 feet, above the river at the bottom of the valley. From a distance, its rows of windows, balconies and red roofs appear almost impossibly attached to the rock. The location was not chosen for convenience. Sümela developed around a natural cave high in the mountains. According to the traditional account, two monks from Athens named Barnabas and Sophronios established the earliest sanctuary there during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I in the late fourth century. UNESCO's description of the site dates the beginning of construction to around 385. The monastery visitors see today, however, is the product of many centuries of rebuilding and expansion. By the sixth century, Byzantine Emperor Justinian ordered work on the monastery. Its importance increased dramatically during the medieval Empire of Trebizond, particularly under Emperor Alexios III in the 14th century. Imperial support brought money, land and privileges that allowed the remote religious community to expand. Buildings gradually spread outward from the original cave until the cliff contained an entire monastic complex. At its height, Sümela included dozens of rooms distributed across several levels. There was a main rock church, chapels, living quarters, kitchens, guest rooms, a library and rooms for students. A large aqueduct built against the mountainside carried fresh water into the monastery. Much of the complex was effectively suspended between the mountain and the valley. Getting there was deliberately difficult. Visitors approached through thick forest before climbing a steep path and narrow staircase to the entrance. The monastery's position provided both isolation for religious life and natural protection. Its most important space is the rock church. Rather than constructing a conventional church from the ground up, builders incorporated the natural cave into the sanctuary. Its interior and exterior walls were covered with frescoes showing scenes from Christian scripture, including images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Many of the surviving paintings visible today were created or restored during later periods, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The monastery is traditionally associated with an icon of the Virgin Mary believed by worshippers to have miraculous significance. That connection explains another common name for Sümela, the Monastery of the Virgin Mary. The surrounding region changed rulers repeatedly, yet the monastery survived. After the Ottoman conquest of the Trabzon region in the 15th century, Sümela was not destroyed. Ottoman rulers allowed it to continue functioning and granted protections and privileges to the religious community. Large-scale renovations continued during the 18th century. In the 19th century, additional buildings transformed Sümela into the massive complex recognizable today. This was one of the monastery's wealthiest periods, and travelers visiting the Black Sea region increasingly wrote about the extraordinary structure in the mountains. Its active religious life ended in the early 20th century. Following war and major political changes between Greece and Türkiye, the Greek Orthodox population associated with the monastery left the region during the population exchange of 1923. Sümela was abandoned. Without residents maintaining the buildings, deterioration accelerated. A fire in 1930 destroyed many of the wooden portions of the complex. Other parts suffered from weather, vandalism and treasure hunting. Frescoes were damaged or removed, roofs disappeared and sections of the monastery became increasingly unstable. The cliff itself created another serious problem. Sümela sits directly below a huge wall of fractured rock. Falling stones posed a threat to both the historic buildings and people visiting them. Modern restoration therefore had to address far more than old walls and paintings. Specialized crews, including mountaineers, worked across the cliffs above the monastery. Dangerous rocks were removed or secured with steel cables. Protective barriers and rock-catching systems were installed while buildings, roofs, pathways, frescoes and sections of the aqueduct underwent restoration. The monastery closed for extended periods during this work. Major restoration began in 2016, and portions reopened gradually. Additional work was required after continuing concerns about rockfalls. Following another closure, Sümela reopened to visitors in May 2022. The work also revealed previously inaccessible areas of the complex and made it possible to preserve parts that had been deteriorating for decades. Sümela has been on Türkiye's UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2000. It is important to distinguish that status from being a fully inscribed World Heritage Site, but the designation reflects the monastery's unusual combination of architecture, history and landscape. The setting remains the feature that makes Sümela immediately recognizable. The monastery is surrounded by the dense forests of Altındere Valley National Park. Clouds and mist frequently move through the mountains, sometimes hiding parts of the cliff completely. When the weather clears, the pale stone buildings can be seen stretching horizontally across the dark rock hundreds of feet above the valley. Up close, the illusion of a building hanging from a mountain begins to make more sense. The original cave provides a natural recess, while generations of builders extended walls, rooms and terraces outward from the rock. From across the valley, though, the engineering still looks almost impossible. Sümela is not simply a church placed on top of a mountain. For more than a millennium, its builders repeatedly expanded directly into and outward from the cliff itself, eventually creating a multi-story religious complex in a location where constructing even a small building would be difficult today. That is why, nearly 1,600 years after its traditional founding, the most remarkable part of Sümela is still the first thing anyone notices. It looks like the mountain is holding the monastery against its wall.