By Marina Zioziou
After 6 whole years, during which there were inaugurations, but also an electronic music party that stirred up a storm of reactions, the Panagia Soumela in Trabzon is again fully accessible to the public. For those who land Pontians, a pilgrimage at Panagia Soumela in Trabzon is a life dream to be fulfilled.
The place where the Monastery is located is rocky and wet. It was necessary, therefore, to work in the natural environment, but also in the buildings of the monastery, which from 1922 onwards were exposed to the natural damage and alterations caused by the abandonment. According to the Turkish authorities, the restoration and restoration of the monument have been completed by 95%.
In August 2021, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew performed the Divine Liturgy, while the first works began in February 2016.
RICH HISTORY
Panagia Soumela, according to tradition, was founded on the slope of Mount Mela in the 4th century (386 AD) by the Athenian monks Barnabas and Sophronius to house the miraculous icon of the Virgin, created by the Evangelist Luke. It was at the height of its glory during the reign of the Great Komnenos of Trebizond (1204-1461).
In 1922, with the exchange of populations, the monastery was abandoned by the monks, looted and handed over to the ravages of time. Before the forced departure in 1923, the monks hid in the chapel of St. Barbara the miraculous icon, the Gospel of Saint Christopher and the cross of Emmanuel Komnenos. The pilgrimage to Panagia Soumela is the leading spiritual institution, with a history that was respected even by the Ottoman sultans.
According to the historian of Pontus, Pericles Triantaphyllides, where there were monasteries in Pontus, Hellenism was kept alive, vibrant and prosperous, while where there were no, the place was rooted in Islam.
XERIZOMOS
On May 19, 1919, with the landing of Mustafa Kemal in Samsun, later known as Ataturk, the second and hardest phase of the Pontian Genocide began. The uprooted people left their homeland and all their belongings, arriving in Greece. They took with them sacred relics and some soil from the land of Pontus, but they left behind the thousands of dead and the monastery, their protector and comforter, Panagia Soumela.
A few years later, the metropolitan of Drama, Lavrentios, built a small church and placed inside it a copy of the icon, which he named Nea Soumela, and two of the last monks of the monastery, the abbot Anthimos Masmanidis and the monk Polykarpos A Polykarpos, settled there.
In 1931, on the initiative of the Metropolitan of Xanthi Polykarpos Psomiadis, who politically belonged to the Venizelist faction, the Prime Minister of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, was asked to act to transfer the icon of Panagia Soumela to Greece.
Thus, with his own actions and in the context of the then promoted Greek-Turkish friendship, the Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Inonu visited Athens, received a delegation to go to Pontus and receive the symbols of Orthodoxy and Hellenism.
At one of the official dinners hosted by the Greek side, Venizelos put the then collaborator of the Minister of Welfare and Northern Greece later, Leonidas Iasonidis, and addressed the Turk as a invited “Turkist”. Iononou was so impressed by Iasonidis’s Turkish and asked him how he knew Turkish and then he was informed that he was a graduate of the University of Constantinople and a fellow of the Turkish state, first in Paris.
After the consent of Inonos, one of the surviving monks of the monastery, Ambrosios Soumeliotis, was recruited, who in October 1931 went to Pontos, carried out the excavation, found the icon and the other two relics and brought them to Athens.
The then metropolitan of Trabzon, Chrysanthos, a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Church of Greece, placed them in the Byzantine Museum, where they remained for 20 years, from ’31 to ’51. Doctor Filon Ktenidis conceived the idea of ​​the story of Panagia Soumela, alerted the whole Pontic world and Vermio was chosen as the most suitable location
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