Sümela Monastery began as a cave in the Black Sea mountains of Türkiye, and everything else was built around it. The buildings hang three hundred metres above a valley of spruce. Two Athenian monks are said to have found an icon of the Virgin in the rock around AD 386. A cave does not turn into the rest of this by itself. Money kept arriving for a thousand years. Alexios III of Trebizond signed over revenues and imperial protection in 1365, and the Ottomans renewed them after taking Trebizond in 1461. What it bought is chapels, cells, a kitchen and a library on ledges under the overhang. At the centre is the Rock Church, painted on its outer face as well as inside, in layers from three periods. The frescoes survive best high up, out of reach: apostles, angels, Saint Ignatius torn apart by lions. Lower down, many painted eyes have been scraped out, and the explanation may not be vandalism: a chip of that paint, boiled, was thought to carry a blessing.
A shuttle stops in the valley; the last part is a steep cobbled stair through spruce and chestnut. The monastery keeps appearing between the trunks and vanishing, and the wall above you grows until it fills the sky. From inside the courtyards you cannot see the rock you are standing on. The building is looked at from the road across the gorge: a row of pale rooms pasted onto three hundred metres of dark stone, held up by nothing you can see. On humid afternoons cloud comes up the valley from below, climbing the cliff until the buildings fade to outlines and then go altogether; a few minutes later it thins and they are back. The monks left in 1923 with the exchange of populations. They buried their icon under the floor of a chapel outside the walls, expecting to return; one came back and dug it up in 1931, and it went to Greece. Restoration in the last decade opened something nobody knew was there: a sealed tunnel with a chapel at the end, painted with heaven and hell.