3 Days Trabzon City Tour: Hagia Sophia, Sumela Monastery & Karaca Cave (Group Tour)

Highlights of the 3 Days Trabzon City Tour

This short break is built around one long, rewarding sightseeing day in and around Trabzon, the historic port city of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. You land at Trabzon Airport, are met and driven to your hotel, and spend the first evening at leisure. The next morning a guide collects you for a full programme that moves from Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques in the old town to forested valleys and a cliff-side monastery in the mountains behind the city, before finishing underground in one of the most colourful caves in the country.

The city part of the day starts at the St. Sophia Church-Mosque, a 13th-century building famous for its well-preserved Byzantine frescoes. You continue to the Gulbahar Hatun Mosque, the walls of Trabzon Castle and the Ataturk Mansion, an elegant villa set on a green hillside, then to the Ortahisar Mosque, which began life as a cathedral of the Comnenian emperors in the old quarter. After a walk along cobbled lanes you drive up to Boztepe, where tea brewed in a samovar comes with a sweeping view over the rooftops and the sea, and then stop at the shores of Lake Sera.

In the afternoon the route turns inland to the Sumela Monastery, founded in the 4th century and built into a vertical rock face above a forest, and to the stream-side paths of Altindere Valley National Park. The drive then follows the old Silk Road over the Zigana Mountains to Karaca Cave near Gumushane, admired for its colourful dripstone formations. On the final morning you check out after breakfast and are transferred back to the airport. Two nights of hotel accommodation, two breakfasts, an English-speaking guide, air-conditioned transport, all transfers and the listed entrance fees are part of the package.