Hagia Sophia of Trabzon

About this place

This church went up between 1238 and 1263, in the very decades when Constantinople itself was in Crusader hands, and it was Manuel I of tiny Trebizond announcing that Byzantium was still alive on this stretch of coast. The result is small by the standards of its famous namesake, about 22 metres long, yet it counts among the finest late Byzantine buildings anywhere: a tall dome on a cross-in-square plan, a carved south porch with a stone frieze telling the story of Adam and Eve, and a coloured marble pavement beneath the dome that you now view through a glass floor. What followed mirrors the Istanbul story on a delay. The Ottomans took the city in 1461, but the conversion to a mosque probably waited until 1584, and the wall paintings then spent centuries under plaster. An Edinburgh University team uncovered the thirteenth-century frescoes between 1957 and 1962, the building opened as a museum in 1964, and in 2013 it became a mosque again. The compromise, in place since a 2020 refit, is a retractable ceiling under the dome, closed for prayers and meant to be drawn back in between, so how much of the painting you actually see depends on your timing and on whoever holds the switch that day. Come expecting a lit museum display and you may leave a little short-changed. The garden is half the pleasure: a quiet lawn looking out over the Black Sea, with the free-standing bell tower of 1427, said to rise about 40 metres, which scholars think may have doubled as an observatory and a lighthouse. Ground is level and access is easy, so it works for families with a pushchair, and the whole visit rarely takes more than an hour unless you settle into the cafe next door. Entry is free because it is a working mosque: doors close to visitors around the five prayers and for longer at Friday noon, headscarves and modest dress are expected, shoes come off. It sits roughly three kilometres west of the old walled town, so take a coastal dolmuş or a ten-minute taxi from Meydan. August in Trabzon is humid rather than scorching and winter is seriously wet, which makes spring and autumn the best seasons for lingering on that lawn.