Trabzon

Trabzon, on Turkey's northeastern Black Sea coast, is one of the country's most historically significant cities — a Byzantine port that served as the capital of the Empire of Trebizond from 1204 to 1461, the last surviving successor state of the Byzantine Empire. Its extraordinary Hagia Sophia — a 13th-century Byzantine church with exceptional frescoes, converted to a mosque — and the vertiginous Sümela Monastery are among the finest Byzantine monuments in Turkey. The Aya Sofya (Trabzon's Hagia Sophia), set in a park above the sea, is smaller than Istanbul's but contains Byzantine frescoes that were partially preserved under Ottoman whitewash — the painted narthex and the Christ Pantocrator in the apse are outstanding. Sümela Monastery, carved into a sheer 300-metre cliff face in the Altındere Valley 50km south of Trabzon, is one of the most dramatically situated religious buildings in the world — a Greek Orthodox monastery founded in 386 AD, abandoned in 1923 and now being carefully restored. The Black Sea region of Trabzon has its own distinct food culture — anchovy (hamsi) dishes, cornbread, muhlama (cheese fondue with cornmeal), local tea plantations producing Turkey's own tea, and the extraordinary Maçka Valley descending from the Pontic Mountains. The plateau villages of Ayder (thermal baths, alpine meadows) and Uzungöl (misty mountain lake) are excellent. Trabzon is undervisited by international tourists — still thoroughly authentic.