Daily Sumela Monastery Tour from Trabzon – Hamsikoy & Karaca Cave

Daily Sumela Monastery Tour from Trabzon – Hamsikoy & Karaca Cave

This daily Sumela tour from Trabzon combines the cliffside Sumela Monastery with Zigana Mountain, Hamsikoy and Karaca Cave. The Torul Glass Terrace is also on the route, all in one well-paced group day. Departing Trabzon at 09:30 and returning in the early evening, it covers the classic highlights of the eastern Black Sea interior with comfortable transport and a group leader.

Sumela, popularly called the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, clings to a sheer rock face about 300 metres above the Altindere Valley in the Macka district. Legend says it was founded in the late 4th century by two monks from Athens, Barnabas and Sophronios, and enlarged in the 6th century by Belisarius on the orders of Emperor Justinian; its name is thought to derive from melas, meaning black. After walking up the forest path to the monastery you drive to around 1,700 metres on Zigana Mountain for a lunch break in a woodland restaurant, then reach Hamsikoy, an old caravan stop on the northern Silk Road route whose name means five villages. Here you taste the famous Hamsikoy rice pudding, slow-cooked for about an hour from local milk, rice, sugar and salt.

The afternoon takes you through the 14.5 km Zigana Tunnel, one of the longest double-tube road tunnels in the world, to the Glass Terrace in the Torul district of Gumushane and on to Karaca Cave, 1,550 metres above sea level, whose dripstone formations and clean air are said to ease asthma. A final stop for pestil and kome, the local fruit-leather and walnut sweets, completes this day tour from Trabzon, with arrival back between 18:00 and 19:00. It is an easy, value-focused daily excursion from Trabzon for families and first-time visitors to the region.