Inkerman Cave Monastery

The Inkerman Monastery of St. Clement (Russian: Инкерманский Свято-Климентовский пещерный монастырь) is a cave monastery in a cliff rising near the mouth of the Black River, in the city of Inkerman, de facto administered as part of the sea port of Sevastopol but de jure belonging to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

The early Christians are supposed to have kept the relics in a grotto which could be visited only on the anniversary of his death.

[1] The Byzantine monastery, probably founded in the 8th century by icon-venerators fleeing persecution in their homeland, had eight chapels of several storeys and an inn accessed by a stairway.

[2] The caves of Inkerman were surveyed by Peter Simon Pallas in 1793 and looted by the British in the 1850s.

During World War II the caves housed the officers of a Soviet army defending Sevastopol.

A postcard from the 1910s