When Amasya is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the tombs the kings of Pontus carved into the southern slope of Mount Harşena. Yet the same limestone cliffs were also part of the city's religious life in the Roman and Byzantine centuries. How much of that life has survived is a matter on which one has to speak plainly. In Cappadocia's Ihlara Valley close to fifty rock-cut churches can be counted, whereas in Amasya no rock church with frescoed walls and a documented plan, and no monastic complex carved into the rock, is known. The city preserves very few architectural traces of nearly seven centuries of Byzantine rule. This article does not try to disguise that gap; it gathers what can be said, on the strength of the available documents, about Amasya's Byzantine-period rock and underground spaces, its church organization and the monastic tradition of the surrounding region.

The Three Layers of the Rock

Mount Harşena is a pointed limestone mass about 272 metres high, dated to the Jurassic. It sits like a cone over the city, north of the deep valley opened by the Yeşilırmak. Limestone is hard, but it can be carved, and this quality allowed people over the centuries to use the rock as shelter, tomb, cistern and tunnel. The fortress area on the slope was inhabited without interruption from the Early Bronze Age until the end of the Ottoman Empire, so the structures left by each age were built over or into one another.

The worked spaces in the rock can be thought of, roughly, in three layers. The oldest and most monumental layer consists of the tombs the Pontic kings carved in the Hellenistic period. Five of them stand on the terrace known as the Maiden's Palace (Kızlar Sarayı) and are associated with the kings from Mithridates I to Pharnakes I; nine rock tombs are known within the fortress boundaries and twenty-one in total, counting the valley and its surroundings. The second layer is formed by the cisterns and stepped tunnels that date from the Hellenistic period and remained in use under Rome. The third layer is the new functions that were given to these empty, sheltered volumes in the post-Roman centuries, that is, in the Byzantine period. The record of this third layer is the weakest, because, unlike the royal tombs, it is not supported by a published systematic excavation report.

The Churches Beneath the Fortress

The clearest official statement about the underground spaces of Harşena appears in the UNESCO Tentative List dossier prepared for Mount Harşena and the rock tombs of the Pontic kings. According to the dossier, three churches belonging to the Eastern Roman period are believed to lie underground in the upper fortress, that is, in the part of Amasya Castle on Mount Harşena. The same dossier notes that the upper fortress contains cisterns, the 186-metre Dungeon Tunnel and the remains of an Ottoman neighbourhood left underground. The mood of the sentence deserves attention: the existence of the churches is reported not as the result of an excavation but as a belief. No published document exists on their plans, names, whether they were painted or not, or their dates.

To call individual hollows around the fortress churches, chapels or hermit cells would therefore be an overstatement with today's knowledge. What can be said more safely is this: Byzantine Amaseia repaired and used its walls on Hellenistic and Roman foundations, kept up the system of cisterns and tunnels in the rock, and also made room for religious buildings within the fortress. Most of the walls seen today belong to the Byzantine or Turkish period anyway. The castle is known to have been extensively repaired after it passed to the Turks in 1075 and to have remained in use until the eighteenth century, when it lost its military importance. This long use may have led to the Byzantine-phase spaces being cleared, altered or buried in later periods.

The conversion of rock from a burial chamber into a religious space is a known practice in Anatolia, but a documented example for Amasya would need to be shown separately. The chambers of the royal tombs are bare, undecorated volumes whose entrances are so high that they can be reached only by ladder. Dowel holes on the facades suggest that the tombs were once clad in marble or timber panels. The later removal of that cladding erased the rock's original splendour but left it open to use. There is no direct record of whether the tomb chambers were used for shelter or worship in the Byzantine period, and to assume it would be to say more than we have.

Documented Christian Sites

The documented trace of a Byzantine-period church in Amasya came to light in 2013 at the Küp Deresi locality of Yavru village, in the central district. In a rescue excavation carried out by the Hitit University Black Sea Archaeology Application and Research Centre on a site that had been illegally dug, a mosaic floor of about twenty-four square metres was found. The medallion composition shows an apple tree in the centre, four apples and three partridges beneath it, together with geometric ornament; one side of the floor is worked in red stones and the other in green. According to museum officials, the building was first built as a dwelling, most likely the house of a wealthy landowner, was converted into a church in the Byzantine period and was later abandoned. The mosaic is displayed today in the Amasya Museum. The find matters because it shows that Christian worship around Amasya was established not only inside the rock but also by converting ordinary houses.

The museum's collection holds other pieces of the city's Christian past as well. On the ground floor are a Byzantine-period bronze sarcophagus and a figured wooden door leaf dated to the Late Byzantine period; in the garden are displayed Byzantine steles and architectural fragments. Reused material completes the picture. The tomb of a Danishmendid governor, dated to about 1145, was built with stones taken from a late Roman necropolis. William Hamilton, who travelled in the region in the nineteenth century, saw on the front wall of an old madrasa on the city's main street ancient cornices, friezes and fragments of Greek inscriptions cut in large letters. In this way the stones of vanished late antique and Christian buildings continued in new structures, but lost their original context.

Amaseia as a Metropolitan City

The scarcity of rock structures does not mean that Amaseia carried little weight in the Byzantine world. The city received the titles of metropolis and first city in the second century and from the third century was the seat of a metropolitan bishopric. As the capital of the Late Roman province of Helenopontus, it was the centre to which the sees of Amisos, Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope, Zaliche and Zela were subordinate. In the tenth century it ranked eleventh among the metropolises of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Such an organization requires a cathedral, an episcopal residence and churches in the surrounding villages. The worship buildings of Byzantine Amaseia should therefore be looked for not inside the rock but in the city centre and on the plain; their later conversion into mosques, inns and houses, or their destruction, has left fewer traces than the rock spaces.

Two names stand out in the city's Christian memory. One is Theodore Tiron, who is said to have been martyred in Amaseia while serving as a soldier in the Roman army during the Great Persecution. According to tradition he refused to make pagan sacrifice, burned the temple of Cybele and was himself burned to death; the year of death is usually given as 306, and as 287 in the Golden Legend. His cult was widespread by the end of the fourth century: Gregory of Nyssa preached a homily in his name in the winter of 381, although it is uncertain whether that shrine stood in Amaseia or in nearby Euchaita. The other name is Asterius, who was bishop between 380 and 390. A lawyer before his episcopate, he left sixteen homilies that have survived. In the eleventh he describes a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Euphemia as he saw it in a church near her tomb; this passage is counted among the earliest and most detailed examples of ekphrasis in Byzantine art history and was cited twice at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 as evidence in favour of the veneration of icons. So from a bishop's own words we learn that in the late fourth century the region had a martyrs' church decorated with paintings. The details of the early Christian saints are the subject of a separate article.

The Monastic Tradition of Pontus

To assess Amasya's rock monasteries it is useful to look at the region's famous examples, though these belong to neighbouring districts rather than to Amasya. Sumela Monastery, set on the edge of a steep cliff in the Altındere Valley in Trabzon's Maçka district, is traditionally dated to about AD 386, the reign of Theodosius I. It is said to have been repaired in the sixth century by Belisarius at the wish of Justinian, and it took its present form in the period of the Empire of Trebizond, especially through the generous grants of Alexios III (1349-1390). Vazelon Monastery in the same district was repaired on Justinian's order in 565; its present structure goes back to a rebuilding of 1410, and it still bears part of the frescoes depicting Heaven and Hell. Both were living monasteries until the population exchange of 1923.

In Cappadocia, in the Ihlara Valley, Byzantine monks from the seventh century onward carved their dwellings and churches into the tuff formed by the eruptions of Mount Hasan. About fifty rock churches stand in the valley today, some decorated with paintings from before Iconoclasm and some in the Macedonian style of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The hard texture of Amasya's limestone may have made such wide, painted church chambers harder to cut than the soft tuff, but this is an inference, not a demonstrated finding. What is certain is that no reliable document is available for a rock monastery in the Amasya area on the scale of these two great traditions.

Remains in the Surrounding Districts

Traces of the Byzantine or earlier periods are also found in Amasya's districts, but most are not rock monasteries. Remains of Byzantine and older periods are mentioned around Merzifon, in settlements such as Gelgiras, Aktarla and Oymaağaç, and in the town centre. Taşova is known to have passed through Hittite, Phrygian, Persian, Pontic, Roman and Byzantine rule. The monastery in the Gümüş quarter of Gümüşhacıköy, although its name may suggest Byzantium, was according to local records built in 1840 by the Greeks living in the area; after the Greeks left in the population exchange it went unused and fell into neglect. This building is an example not of the Byzantine monastic tradition but of the late architecture of the Greek community under Ottoman rule. The widespread stories that attach tales of hermit retreat to rock hollows should likewise be read with caution in this context.

The Christian population remained in the city after the end of Byzantine rule. In 1317, when Turkmen attacks were intensifying, the metropolitan Callistus, appointed in 1315, could not enter Amaseia; with the permission of Patriarch John XIII the metropolis was moved to Limnia, which lay within the Empire of Trebizond and was considered safer. In 1384 the bishop of Limnia temporarily conducted the affairs of the metropolis of Amaseia. A document of the period says that the once famous and great metropolis of Amaseia had become impoverished and ruined by the invasion of foreigners. The Orthodox metropolis lasted until the 1923 exchange; in 1922 it had about forty thousand Christians, half of them Greeks. Its last metropolitan was Germanos Karavangelis.

The End of Byzantine Rule and the Erasure of Traces

Byzantine rule in Amasya, lasting roughly seven centuries, ended in 1075 when the Danishmend emirs took the city. In the Alexiad, Amaseia appears as the place where Alexios Komnenos received the Norman commander Ursel as a captive from the Turkish commander Tutakh; in the episode Anna Komnene recounts, unrest breaks out among the townspeople whom Alexios approaches to raise the ransom. The neutrality of the account is disputed, but it shows that Amaseia was an important town on the eastern frontier of Byzantium and that the frontier was rapidly retreating.

Under the Danishmendids, then the Anatolian Seljuks and the Ilkhanids, the city became a centre of Islamic culture; the Burmalı Minare Mosque, the Gök Madrasa and the Torumtay Tomb are works of this age. The founding of new buildings meant that the usable parts of older ones went into new construction. The stone of a church went into a mosque, a gravestone into a tomb. The empty volumes in the rock were also altered to suit the needs of their new owners; the cisterns and tunnels served the Ottoman neighbourhood inside the fortress. This long process explains why so few spaces of the Byzantine phase can be identified. Nothing may be missing from the rock; it has become hard to tell the Byzantine layer apart within so many superimposed uses.

What Research Has Left Open

The most striking fact about Amasya's Byzantine-period rock structures is the inadequacy of scholarly work. The Pontic royal tombs have been documented in detail in Robert Fleischer's comprehensive monograph of 2017, volume 56 of the Istanbuler Forschungen series. No comparable study exists for the Byzantine layer. The existence of underground churches in the fortress appears in the UNESCO dossier as a belief, while chance finds such as the mosaic building at Yavru village show that Amasya's Christian past lies just below the surface. That a floor uncovered during illegal digging reached the museum is also a reminder of how fragile such remains are.

A responsible account of Amasya's rock churches must therefore say three things together. First, that in the Byzantine period the city was an important metropolitan centre and a Christian city with martyrs' churches and a well-known bishop. Second, that there is a belief in Eastern Roman underground churches beneath the fortress, but that they have not been demonstrated by excavation. Third, that a rock monastery with known plan and paintings, on the scale of Sumela and Ihlara, has not been proved for Amasya. Archaeological and architectural-historical work may in future clarify how the hollows of the upper fortress, the tunnels around the Maiden's Palace and the small rock tombs of the valley were used in the Byzantine period. Until then, what is said about these spaces has to remain as cautious as the sources allow.

Chronology

Second century: Amaseia receives the titles of metropolis and first city.

306: According to tradition Theodore Tiron is martyred in Amaseia (287 in the Golden Legend).

381: Gregory of Nyssa preaches a homily in Theodore's name.

380-390: Asterius becomes bishop of Amaseia; his homilies survive.

Tenth century: The metropolis of Amaseia ranks eleventh among the metropolises subject to the Patriarchate.

1075: The Danishmendids take Amasya; roughly seven centuries of Byzantine rule end.

About 1145: The tomb of a Danishmendid governor is built with material taken from a late Roman necropolis.

1317: The metropolitan Callistus cannot enter the city; the metropolis is moved to Limnia.

1840: A monastery is built by the Greeks at Gümüşhacıköy.

1923: The population exchange ends the Orthodox metropolis of Amasya.

2013: The apple-tree and partridge mosaic of a building converted into a church is found at Küp Deresi, Yavru village.

Bibliography

Official sources

  • UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Mount Harşena and the Rock-tombs of the Pontic Kings", Tentative List dossier, whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6039 whc.unesco.org
  • Amasya Governorate and Amasya Municipality, information pages on the Amasya Museum and the Royal Rock Tombs
  • Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı, "Amasya Kalesi" kulturportali.gov.tr

Other sources

  • Wikipedia, "Amasya", "Tombs of the kings of Pontus", "Pontic Greek culture" en.wikipedia.org
  • Robert Fleischer, Die Felsgräber der Könige von Pontos in Amasya, Istanbuler Forschungen 56, Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2017
  • Amasya Museum, news reports on the Yavru village apple mosaic rescue excavation (2013, 2024)
  • Wikipedia, "Asterius of Amasea", "Theodore Tiron", "Sümela Monastery", "Vazelon Monastery", "Ihlara valley" en.wikipedia.org

Online sources