The ancient monastery hanging from the side of a cliff гей порно большой

If its ancient walls could talk, Sümela Monastery in eastern Turkey would have quite a few stories to tell.

Since its founding in the 4th-century CE by some of the earliest Christians to arrive along the Black Sea coast, the shrine has witnessed the evolution of the Roman Empire into the Byzantine era, the rise of the Ottomans, the struggle for Turkish independence after World War I, decades of vandalism and neglect, and an almost miraculous resurrection in modern times.

Even more alluring than Sümela’s tumultuous history is a location that seems generated by artificial intelligence or computer graphics rather than a real place — chapels, courtyards, library, living quarters, bell tower, aqueduct and a stone-enclosed sacred spring precariously perched on a rocky ledge nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) above a wooded river valley in the Pontic Alps.

Every day, thousands of visitors — some of them religious pilgrims but most drawn by the splendor of the early Christian frescoes and architecture that seems to defy gravity — make their way along a cobblestone path to the monastery. Another draw is the fact that Sümela is on UNESCO’s tentative list for designation as a world heritage site.

Now a state museum rather than an active religious community, the monastery has undergone years of meticulous restoration to make the site safe for tourism and mitigate damage inflicted by fires, treasure hunters, vandals and unruly visitors.

“We’ve always had a problem with falling rocks,” says Levent Alniak, manager of museums and historic sites for Trabzon province. “To prevent damage to the structures and harm to visitors, we had industrial mountain-climbers secure the cliff.” Dangling in midair, the climbers used steel cables and huge metal stakes to affix steel mesh netting and barriers to the towering rockface above the monastery.

The ongoing restoration yielded unexpected treasures such as a secret tunnel leading to a previously undiscovered chapel that may have been used as an observation post to defend the monastery. Inside the tiny church, archaeologists found dramatic frescoes depicting heaven and hell, and life and death.