Aya Nikola is one of the most important old buildings on Cunda, the island off Ayvalık also called Alibey, and stands at Namık Kemal Mahallesi, Şeref Sokak. It is dedicated to the archangels Gabriel and Michael as protectors, which is why it is equally known as the Taksiyarhis church -- a name shared with another church in Ayvalık town, a different building.
It is a single-domed basilica on a rectangular plan, built in the neoclassical manner common when it went up, out of the local sarimsak stone quarried nearby. Inside, the walls carry religious figures together with plant and geometric ornament. Of the two bell towers it once had, only one is still standing.
Its later history reads as a sequence of changes of use. In 1927-28 the church was converted into a mosque without a minaret; it was damaged in the 1944 earthquake and abandoned; and in 1989 it was registered as an immovable cultural property requiring protection.
In 2011 the building was assigned to the Rahmi M. Koç Museology and Culture Foundation to be made into a museum, and after restoration it opened to visitors in 2014 as the Cunda Rahmi M. Koç Museum.
Getting there
- Access
- City transport reaches it.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Balıkesir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 4.9 °C in January to 25.7 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (87 mm) and lightest in August (5 mm). Long-term means for 1999-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
