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Photo: H. Tcholakian, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Armenian Monastery of the All-Saviour is on a hill southeast of town. Its foundation date was maybe 1424 AD, over an earlier Greek church. Armenians who had survived the modern massacres left after 1923 and the place fell derelict - the walls and bell tower have gone. The church contains frescoes and has been re-roofed but you're unlikely to find it open.
Kaymaklı Monastery is a ruined Armenian Apostolic monastery near Trabzon, Turkey, which served as the seat of the Trebizond diocese tied to the Patriarchate of Constantinople until the Armenian genocide in 1915.
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St Philip Church
Built as St Philip Church in 1302 and extended into a cathedral in 1461. It was converted into a mosque circa 1665. In 1968 this was rebuilt, so what you see now is retro-Ottoman.
Used as a mosque since 1953, and some believe it used to be St Elefterios Church, built by the Genoese in the 15th century. However it doesn't look it, and more likely that church was closer to the port and long ago demolished. However Hüsnü Köktuğ has a strong claim to be the city's ugliest mosque, with its jarring modern facade. In 2025 it's closed for reconstruction.
Kızlar Manastırı
The only nunnery in the city was built in the 1360s around one of the holy cave springs at Boztepe. The rock church has frescoes depicting Alexios III, his wife Theodora and his mother Irene (the likely benefactor of the monastery). It closed in 1922 when the Orthodox population were deported. It was restored in 2021.
Ottoman mosque, built in 1874 to replace a 16th century masjid but no longer in use.
This was rebuilt by the Genoese when they took over in 1306. They called it "beautiful castle", Leonkastron or in Turkish Güzelhisar, which you wouldn't guess from its shambles of a ruin.
Santa Mariya Kilisesi
This is the only church in Trabzon that still has regular Roman Catholic masses. It was founded by Italian Capuchin monks expelled from Tbilisi in 1845, as part of a long anti-Catholic campaign by the Russian Tsars.