St. Sabbas the Sanctifieds's Monastery

The men's monastery of Saint Sabbas the Sanctified stands in the Chylter-Marmara cave complex near the village of Ternivka (Chylter-Marmara) in the Balaklava district of Crimea, in the Chylter-kaya cliff ("the Lattice Rock")¹. The first scholarly description of the complex was made in 1886 by A.L. Bertier-Delagard¹.

In 1935, V.P. Babenchikov carried out archaeological investigations here, clearing the main church and several rooms of the second tier¹. The most detailed description of the complex, with architectural measurements, was published in 1978 by Ye.V. Weimarn and M.Ya. Choref¹.

The cave complex has five tiers; researchers counted 56 surviving rooms in it and a further 30 badly ruined ones, among them four churches¹.

The first cave dwellings apparently appeared here in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries¹.

In the fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century, during the flourishing of the principality of Theodoro, monastic life at Chylter experienced a rise, and the house reached its greatest extent¹. To this period belongs a dated inscription in Church No. 3 on the fourth tier: a cross and the words "servant of god... 6911" are cut into the wall, that is, the year 1403¹.

The Ottoman conquest of Crimea in 1475 led Orthodox monasteries, cave ones among them, to be partly destroyed and partly fall into decline; individual monks may have lived here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well, but almost no traces of their presence remain¹.

In 2007, monastic life was restored here².