Sümela Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery welded to a cliff 300 metres above a valley of spruce in the Black Sea mountains of Türkiye, in Trabzon province, built around a cave church painted with frescoes inside and out, and it is climbed to by a cobbled stair through the forest and seen whole only from across the gorge, where the cloud fills the valley from below and erases it several times in an afternoon. The monastery was founded, by tradition, in the fourth century by two Athenian monks who found an icon of the Virgin in the cave, and it grew into a complex of chapels, cells and a library on ledges under the overhang, granted revenues and imperial protection by Alexios III of Trebizond in 1365 and kept by the Ottoman sultans after them; the monks left in 1923 with the exchange of populations, burying their icon under the floor of a chapel outside the walls and expecting to return, and the icon was later dug up and taken to Greece. The rock church at the heart carries frescoes on both faces, the courtyard side as well as the interior, in layers from three periods, Christ, the Virgin and scenes of the Bible, many with the eyes scraped out.
One explanation for the missing eyes is not vandalism, since locals are said to have scraped the paint because a chip of it, boiled, was thought to carry a blessing. The shuttle stops in the valley of the Altındere national park and the rest is a steep walk up stone steps through spruce and chestnut, and from inside the courtyard the rock cannot be seen, so the view of the whole cliff with the monastery pinned to it is from the road across the gorge. The cloud sits lowest in the muggy months of August and September, when the monastery is hidden and handed back through the day, and in October the chestnut and lime turn gold against the dark spruce. Sümela is a church stuck to a cliff, and the cloud decides when it is seen.