Aladzha Monastery

Worth a detour

Monks hollowed cells, a church, a refectory and a kitchen straight out of a limestone cliff here and lived in them through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The rock-cut rooms are the entire visit, and they are honestly bare — the wall paintings that gave the place its Turkish name, alaca, meaning motley, have almost entirely gone. It closes from December to February, which catches people out.

Story

Background

The cliff stands a few kilometres inland from the Golden Sands hotel strip, inside the nature park. The lower level holds the church, the monks' cells, a refectory and kitchen, a small burial church with a crypt beneath it, and store rooms. Above, reached by stairs cut and later rebuilt, a natural niche in the rock was turned into a chapel.

Six or seven hundred metres west are two small catacombs where pottery, coins and scratched graffiti point to Christian use in the fifth and sixth centuries — so people were living in these rocks long before the medieval community arrived. The monastery declined after the Ottoman conquest at the end of the fourteenth century and was probably empty by the sixteenth.

A museum building from the 1970s at the foot of the cliff holds the permanent display and the ticket desk. Adults pay about €5, students about €3. Hours are the thing to check: daily from nine to five between May and October, ten to five in November and again in March and April with Mondays and Tuesdays off, and nothing at all from December through February. Out of season the woods around it are the better half of the trip.