Guide
Taksiyarhis was Ayvalık's first church, and the building visible today is the third version of it. The first, in the 15th century, was small. A fresco above the bema showing Paul and Peter presenting the building to God, and an inscription of 1753 over the south garden entrance, belong to a second, two-storey basilica with three domes. An inscription of 1844 over the main entrance marks the third: a barrel-vaulted basilica whose upper structure was built entirely of timber.
You enter the three-aisled church through a narthex on the west front, by way of three doors. The ambo in the central aisle is decorated with a plaster relief of a lion and carries icons of the saints; a spiral stair leads up to it. Diagonally opposite, the cathedra is worked in marble relief with plant ornament and gold leaf. The iconostasis, again marble relief with gilding, is set with marble icons telling the life of Christ, and behind it lies the apse. On the upper floor a U-shaped wooden gallery with sixteen round-arched windows is the gynaikeion, the women's section, reached by stone stairs in the bell tower to the north and wooden stairs to the south.
The marbling on the walls is not marble. It is secco painting on lime plaster over a timber lath ground, in an eclectic manner, and a signature in the south corner of the building attributes it to an artist named M. Pizdem. Ayvalık is earthquake country, and the building has been damaged and repaired repeatedly; each repair changed the decoration. During one of them the frescoed Christ Pantokrator in the dome and the apostles around the barrel vault were replaced with neo-classical oil paintings.
From 1927 the building served for a long time as a tobacco monopoly warehouse, and was then abandoned. The Ministry of Culture restored it in 2012, and in 2013 it opened as the Taksiyarhis Monument Museum, run as a unit of the Balıkesir Kuvayı Milliye Museum Directorate.
