The things to do in Trabzon fall into two halves. In the city are the thirteenth-century Ayasofya, the old churches and Ottoman mosques of the walled centre, a cluster of museums and the mansion where Atatürk stayed in 1937. Out of town, in the Maçka district, the Sümela Monastery hangs on a cliff above the forested Altındere valley, and in the Çaykara district lies the lake at Uzungöl. Add the yaylas, the high summer pastures, and a coast with a castle, a mosaic-floored church and a landslide lake. The sights below are grouped so that places close to one another can share a day, and each has its own guide on this site.
The Ayasofya and the walled centre
Trabzon's Ayasofya is not the İstanbul building of the same name. It was built in 1250–1260, in the reign of Manuel I Komnenos of the Empire of Trebizond, became a mosque after Mehmed II took the city, was a museum from 1966 and has again been a mosque since 2013. Its builders combined provincial Byzantine design, an onion dome from Georgia and Seljuk stone carving. The south front is the richest: a carved frieze of the creation of Adam and Eve, centaurs, griffins and doves, and on the keystone of the arch the single-headed eagle of the Komnenos family, who held Trabzon for 257 years. Inside, a floor of opus sectile in nine kinds of marble survived intact under a timber covering. The frescoes, brought out from under plaster by Edinburgh University's Russell Trust in 1957–1961, show Christ Pantocrator in the dome and the twelve apostles between the windows of the twelve-sided drum.
The Ortahisar Mosque, inside the walls, was once the church of the Theotokos Chrysokephalos, where the Komnenos emperors were crowned; Mehmed II made it a mosque in 1461, and the Ottomans knew it as the Old Mosque. Its walnut minbar is carved partly in true kündekari, and its two-coloured minaret rises about thirty-five metres. West of Ortahisar, near the Zağnos bridge, the Gülbahar Hatun Mosque of about 1514 and the octagonal tomb Selim I built for his mother in 1505 are what remain of a larger complex. The bridge itself is named for a fifteenth-century repair by Zağnos Mehmet Pasha. Küçük Ayvasıl, the church of St Anna, already needed repair in 884–885, and the provincial directorate counts it among the city's oldest churches.
The house on Zağnos Caddesi run as the Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Ottoman Culture House is said to be Suleiman the Magnificent's birthplace and his home until the age of fifteen, and displays Suleiman, Selim I and Mehmed II in wax. For the old commercial quarter, the Taşhan was built in 1531–1533 by İskender Paşa, then governor, and the three-storey Vakıf Han beside the bedesten dates from 1781.
The city's museums
The Trabzon Museum occupies the Kostaki mansion on Zeytinlik Avenue, built between 1898 and 1913 for the banker Kostaki Theophylaktos by Italian architects whose names are not recorded. Every floor above the basement has painted walls; archaeology is shown below, the house itself on the ground floor and ethnography on the first. Atatürk and Latife Hanım were received here in September 1924. The Trabzon City Museum, in a Central Bank branch of 1963, reads the city by subject — its periods, highland culture, kitchen, sport and trade — through digital screens and staged reconstructions rather than rows of cases.
Three smaller collections suit particular interests. The Ortahisar municipality's Trabzon History Museum holds 7,800 documents and 2,200 photographs, among them engravings by foreign travellers and the earliest Trabzon postcards. The Trabzonspor Museum keeps half a cup: in 1958 the federation could not separate Trabzon Idmanocagi and Ankara Havagucu, declared both champions and had the trophy cut in two. The Press History Museum follows printing in Trabzon from 1865 and shows one of three Frankenthal presses; the other two are in Germany and Russia.
The Atatürk Pavilion
On the Soğuksu ridge above the town stands the summer house that Konstantin Kabayanidis built in the early nineteenth century, its ornament openly European. Atatürk came here in 1924 and 1930 and stayed two nights in June 1937. On 11 June of that year, in this house, he decided to give all his property to the nation and sent the list to the prime minister, and that decision is why the house became a museum in 1943.
Sümela, Vazelon and the Maçka valleys
Sümela Monastery clings to a sheer cliff on Karadağ, roughly three hundred metres above the floor of the Altındere valley. Tradition puts its founding in the fourth century, by two monks from Athens named Barnabas and Sophronios. The recorded story includes Belisarius's repairs on Justinian's orders, endowments from Alexios III of Trebizond, and a nineteenth-century flowering that gave the monastery its present look, before it was emptied after 1923. A long, narrow stair climbs to the main gate and a second leads down to the inner courtyard; around it are the rock church, chapels, kitchen, library and sacred spring, and at the entrance the mostly collapsed arches of an aqueduct. The name has two explanations, both from melas, black: the dark mountains, or the dark image of the Virgin inside.
The monastery lies within Altındere Valley National Park, 47 kilometres from Trabzon by surfaced road: a narrow valley of oriental spruce and mixed forest climbing to 2,800 metres, with small waterfalls and trout in the Meryemana stream. Two viewing terraces stand on the Sesli Kaya Yolu route, and bungalows in the Altındere day-use area take overnight guests; the park's busiest months run from April to the end of October. The small Aya Varvara church, of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, stands close to Sümela on the Maçka road and may have been the monastery's burial ground. Vazelon, forty kilometres south of the city, is a ruined stone monastery of many storeys whose standing buildings date from 1410, with Paradise, Hell and the Last Judgement painted on its outer north wall.
Uzungöl and Çaykara
Uzungöl is a lake at 1,090 metres in the Çaykara district, nineteen kilometres from the district town, formed when rock falling from the steep valley sides blocked the Haldizen stream. The slopes around it are densely forested, and the wooden houses of Serah village complete the scene. Walking, birdwatching and botanical tours are organised here, and from the lake you can carry on to higher mountain lakes and other pastures; bear, wolf, wild goat and Caucasian black grouse live in the mountains around. The Dursun Ali İnan Museum in the town shows a wooden Uzungöl house, local and archaeological pieces gathered over thirty years, and sculptures its founder made from tree roots. At Ataköy, twenty-one kilometres from Çaykara, the village house where Cevdet Sunay, the fifth president of Türkiye, was born in 1900 is kept as a museum.
The yaylas
Trabzon's yaylas are a reason in themselves to go inland. Sultanmurat, at 2,000 metres and above the trees, has small hotels and guesthouses and keeps the memory of Murat IV, who led the prayer here in 1635 on his way back from Iran. Haçka, a plateau of the Zigana mountains above Düzköy at roughly 1,800 metres, mixes spruce and alpine meadow and draws campers in summer. Kayabaşı, ringed by spruce at a similar height, is reached from Işıklar, in Akçaabat, by 16 kilometres of asphalt, and is known for its walking trails.
Along the coast
Akçakale stands on a terrace above the sea 18 kilometres west of Trabzon, a castle probably raised by Alexios II in 1297–1330. In Ortamahalle, the old quarter of Akçaabat, the church of the Archangel, now used for talks and exhibitions, keeps a floor mosaic of black, white and red stone that archaeologists date to the eleventh or twelfth century. Also in the Akçaabat district, Sera Lake took shape within eighteen days after a landslide blocked the Derecik valley on 21 February 1950. At Çamburnu in Sürmene, on the Trabzon–Rize road, a small park protects a stretch of shore that, according to the nature conservation directorate, botanical literature records as the point where Scots pine grows right down to the sea. In the Of district, the Hapsiyaş bridge is roofed with tiles along its whole length, and near Düzköy the cave at Çal Köy has been fitted with lighting and walkways.
