Ümit Tepesi — Hope Hill — rises at the center of Heybeliada, the second largest of the Princes' Islands. On its summit sits the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, whose origins stretch back at least to the 9th century, when Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople was buried there. The monastery was rebuilt with an extensive library in 1550, burned in 1821, and reconstructed again in 1844, when it became home to the Halki Theological Seminary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople — for over a century the primary institution for training Greek Orthodox clergy in Turkey. The seminary educated generations of clergy until 1971, when Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled parts of the Private University Law unconstitutional, requiring all private institutions of higher education to join state universities or close. The seminary's Board of Trustees declined to merge with the University of Istanbul. The school shut its doors. It has not reopened.

After the seminary closed, the grounds fell quiet. The Byzantine Church of the Holy Trinity remained open to visitors, but the gardens that had once served a living monastic community lost their purpose and, over decades, lost their form. By 2013, the site retained no significant gardens worth the name. That year, the Abbot of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and Bishop of Bursa, Elpidophoros (who would later become Archbishop of America), extended an invitation to Professor Nerantzia Tzortzi of the Landscape Architecture Laboratory at Neapolis University Paphos. The project that followed was not merely horticultural. It was an act of scholarly archaeology: reconstructing what a Byzantine monastic garden would have looked like, sounded like, smelled like — drawing on manuscripts, miniatures, religious icons, and archives from the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice, the Byzantine Research Centre at Oxford, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

The centerpiece of the reconstructed garden is the Trail of Virtues, a path planted according to instructions found in that 12th-century Oxford manuscript. Fourteen plants stand along the seminary's entrance path, each chosen for its association with a specific virtue in Byzantine moral theology. Cedar, Aleppo pine, and Mediterranean cypress together embody self-discipline. Orange trees signify prudence. A date palm represents justice. Lily — humility expressed as indigence. Fig for gentleness, grapevine for calmness, pomegranate for courage, peach for humility, oriental sweetgum for prayer, sarsaparilla for knowledge, olive for charity, raspberry for obedience. Walking through them is an experience unlike most garden visits: each plant is simultaneously botanical specimen, theological argument, and living quotation from a text copied by a medieval scribe who could not have imagined it being read — and planted — a thousand years later on an Aegean island.

The garden does not stop at virtues. A Garden of Bible contains 66 of the 82 plants mentioned in scripture, planted around the Church of the Holy Trinity. A biodynamic vineyard anchors the edible garden at the perimeter — a reference to the medieval pattern called the Hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden of monastic self-sufficiency. Between the virtue trees, a Byzantine Meadow blooms with tulips, dandelions, and cyclamens, all plants that carried specific symbolic weight in the visual vocabulary of Byzantine art and theology. The entire project is self-managed and sustained by volunteer contributions from both Greek and Turkish participants — a collaboration that carries its own symbolic weight given the political context surrounding the seminary itself. All material for the garden has come from this shared effort.

The closure of the Halki Seminary has remained a point of contention involving the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Turkish government, successive U.S. administrations, and the Greek government for more than fifty years. The Patriarchate holds that the closure prevents the Orthodox community from training clergy within Turkey, which it argues is essential to the continuation of the Patriarchate in Istanbul. Turkish authorities have argued, through Anadolu Agency and official channels, that the Patriarchate has declined a workable arrangement within Turkey's higher education framework. In 2021, President Erdoğan suggested that reopening might be possible if Greece improved conditions for the Muslim population of Thrace. As of this writing the seminary remains closed to students, though the monastery and gardens are accessible to visitors. The garden grows on regardless — tended, symbolic, patient.