St Matthew and the Lost Monastery of Issyk-Kul

Where is the Apostle Matthew buried? For two thousand years nobody has known for certain. The cathedral of Salerno in Italy says it keeps his relics, and pilgrims go there. But there is another, much stranger answer — and it points to the shore of Issyk-Kul.

The Catalan Atlas

In 1375 the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques of Majorca drew one of the most famous maps of the Middle Ages, the Catalan Atlas, now in the National Library of France. Far to the east, beside a lake in Central Asia, it shows a building with a cross, and an inscription:

Place called Issyk-Kul. In this place there is a monastery of Armenian brothers, where the body of St Matthew, apostle and evangelist, is said to be.

How could Christian monks have reached the Tien Shan? In fact, the Silk Road brought many Christians to Central Asia: Nestorian churches and graves from the 7th–14th centuries have been found in the Chui valley and around Issyk-Kul. One tradition says the apostle’s followers carried his relics east to escape persecution in the Roman Empire.

Searching for the monastery

In the 1850s the Russian explorer Pyotr Semenov — later honoured with the name Semenov-Tian-Shansky — studied the Catalan Atlas and went looking for the monastery. He found no ruins, but he heard many legends from the local Kyrgyz about a city that sank beneath the lake, and saw objects the waves had thrown up on the shore. He concluded that the monastery might have stood near the bay of Kurmenty on the north-east shore, and later disappeared under the rising water.

Other travellers of the 19th century wrote of ruins under the water near the mouths of the Tüp and Koi-Suu rivers, and of potsherds marked with crosses on the beach.

The monastery at Svetly Mys

In 1882 Russian monks founded the Holy Trinity Monastery at Svetly Mys (‘Bright Cape’), not far from the place Semenov had suggested. It was attacked during the uprising of 1916, and later closed in Soviet times; a few of its old wooden buildings survive.

Since the 1990s the Orthodox Church and Kyrgyz archaeologists have organised several expeditions to look for the lost Armenian monastery, and divers have explored remains of drowned settlements in the bay. Some searchers have claimed to detect a large metal object on the lake bed — perhaps a reliquary — but nothing has been confirmed. Local people, Christian and Muslim alike, tell of mysterious lights in the sky over the bay.

Legend or history?

Nobody can say. What is certain is that the Catalan Atlas really does place St Matthew at Issyk-Kul, that Christians really did live on the shores of the lake in the Middle Ages, and that the lake really has swallowed settlements as its level rose. The rest is still waiting at the bottom of the lake.

Visit

Svetly Mys and Tüp lie on the north-east shore of Issyk-Kul, about 40 minutes from Karakol — an easy detour on a trip around the lake. Read also: Religion & sacred places of Kyrgyzstan and The lost treasures of Issyk-Kul.