Black Sea Turkey — hamsi fish, hazelnut valleys, and the Sumela Monastery
Trabzon sits on Turkey's Black Sea coast where the Pontic Alps fall straight to the sea — a lush, rain-fed landscape of hazelnut orchards, tea gardens, and fishing villages entirely unlike the arid Anatolian heartland. The city is the anchor of the Eastern Black Sea food culture: hamsi (Black Sea anchovy), cornbread, muhlama (melted cheese fondue), and the extraordinary honey of the mountain villages. The 4th-century Sumela Monastery clings to a cliff face 300m above a forested gorge 50km south.
Trabzon (ancient Trebizond) was a major Black Sea trading port for 2,500 years — a colony of Miletus, then a Byzantine city, and finally the capital of the Empire of Trebizond from 1204 to 1461, the last surviving fragment of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. The Ottoman conquest in 1461 ended the last Greek Christian empire; the Atatürk era transformed the city after 1923 and expelled its Greek Orthodox population in the population exchanges that followed.