VIRGIN ON THE VERGE
AGreek Orthodox monastery — one of the oldest in the Christian world — built into the side of a mountain 1,200m above sea level has reopened to visitors after six months of maintenance work to guard against rockfalls.
The monastery, clinging to Karada Mountain above the Altmdere Valley, is a major tourist attraction in the Altindere National Park in northeastern Turkey. It closed to visitors on November 1 2021 for the fourth time in five years due to the risk of falling rocks — this time from a slope directly above the entrance. The slope has now been reinforced with a series of 16mlong steel poles and the complex has been declared safe to visit again.
Though some historians dispute the claim, a common backstory is that the monastery began around 386AD during the reign of Emperor Theodosius I (375-395). According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared in a dream to two Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronios, and directed them to a distant cave where they would find a painting of her by Jesus’s Apostle Luke.
When they did indeed find an icon of her in a cave here, they decided to protect it by building a simple church around it.
Over the centuries, the monastery has been through alternating periods of abandonment and expansion. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian (527-568AD) ordered its enlargement, and it reached its present form during the reign of Alexios III (1349-1390).
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey led to its abandonment and it would be 88 years before it would open to the public as a museum in 2010.
Today, visitors can explore its bell tower, fountain, chapels, kitchens, student rooms, sleeping cells, and a library. The original Rock Church, however, is the main attraction, particularly for its frescoes depicting the life of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, which date from the 1300s to the 1700s.
Once a year, on August 15, a Greek Orthodox service is held at the monastery.
The complex lies 45km from the city of Trabzon on the coast of the Black Sea, about 1,000km east of Istanbul.
Also known as the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Virgin Mary, its Greek name is said to be derived from the word “melas”, meaning “dark” or “black”, which also inspired the old name for the mountain to which the monastery clings.
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