Barnabas and Sophronius of Mela

Two Athenians

What the synaxarion says of them directly is one sentence: that Barnabas and his nephew Sophronius were Athenians, that they were saved on Mount Mela near Trebizond, and that they died in 412. Everything else that is told of them belongs to the foundation tradition of the monastery they left behind, and is set out below as such.

The bare notice is nonetheless worth attending to. Athens in the late fourth century was still the university town of the Greek world and still substantially pagan in its schools; Christian monasticism there was young. Two Athenians, uncle and nephew, going out together to the far eastern shore of the Black Sea is a movement in the ordinary direction of that generation — away from the cities and towards the deserts and mountains, and towards the Pontic and Cappadocian highlands where Basil the Great had planted the coenobitic life in the decade before.

The mountain and the icon

The tradition of the house is this. The Evangelist Luke painted an icon of the Mother of God; after his repose it passed to his disciple Ananias, who brought it to Athens, where it was set in a church of the Theotokos. To two monks of that city, Barnabas and Sophronius, the Theotokos appeared and bade them go to Mount Mela in Pontus; and when they came to the church to take their leave, they found that the icon had been borne away by angels. They followed, and found it waiting for them in a cave in the cliff of Mount Mela — and there they stayed, and built the first church around it.

The monastery's own reckoning puts the foundation in about AD 386, in the reign of Theodosius I, which is where the local tradition and the Turkish antiquities service both place it; the synaxarion's date of 412 for the deaths of the two founders is consistent with it and gives them some twenty-five years in the cave. Neither figure is independently documented.

The site itself is the fact that needs no tradition. The Soumela monastery is built into a vertical rock-face at about 1,200 metres, its buildings clamped to the cliff over a wooded gorge, the cave-church at its heart, its walls painted inside and out with frescoes. It is one of the most extraordinary religious sites in Anatolia, and it is impossible to look at it without concluding that whoever first climbed to that ledge did so deliberately, for the reason the tradition gives.

The house they founded

Their foundation outlasted them by fifteen centuries. It fell into ruin and was restored in the seventh century by Christopher of Mela, a native of Gazara near Trebizond, whom the calendar keeps on this same day; the Byzantine tradition associates a further sixth-century restoration with the general Belisarius under Justinian. Under the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461) it became the imperial sanctuary of the Grand Komnenoi: Alexios III issued it a chrysobull in 1365 confirming its autonomy, exempting it from taxes and settling an annual subvention on it, in thanksgiving — the story goes — for deliverance from a storm at sea by the prayers of the Theotokos. After the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond in 1461 successive sultans confirmed its privileges by firman, and it remained a working monastery and the greatest place of pilgrimage of the Pontic Greeks until the population exchange of 1923, when the monks left and the house was abandoned.

The icon went with them. Recovered from its hiding-place in 1931, it was installed in 1930–1952 in the new monastery of Panagia Soumela built by the refugees at Kastania on the slopes of Mount Vermio in Greek Macedonia, where it remains, and where the Pontic Greeks keep the Dormition each August as the great feast of their nation in exile. Since 2010 the Ecumenical Patriarch has been permitted to celebrate the Divine Liturgy in the old monastery on the Dormition on occasional years.