The monastery is a legacy of one of Crimea's great medieval communities. In the fourteenth century, when Surp Khach was founded, Armenians formed a substantial and influential population in the eastern part of the peninsula, merchants and craftsmen and clergy who made this land a far outpost of Armenian Christian life. The Monastery of the Holy Cross became a heart of that community's faith, an Armenian spiritual center whose importance is measured in the sheer devotion it inspired. Its very name, Surp Khach, invokes the cross at the core of Armenian Christianity, and for the faithful who climbed to it, the journey up into the hills was itself an act of pilgrimage, a tradition the monastery has sustained across the centuries.

For most of its history the monastery was not only a place of prayer but a considerable institution in its own right. Before the Soviet state nationalized it, Surp Khach held some four thousand acres of land, a substantial estate that speaks to how significant and well-endowed the monastery had become over the generations. That wealth vanished in the twentieth century, when the property was seized. The Soviet era used the old monastery for a succession of secular purposes that could hardly have been more distant from its founding intent, pressing it into service at various times as a Young Pioneer camp for children and even as a tuberculosis clinic. It was an indignity common to religious houses across the region, yet the buildings themselves survived the century of repurposing intact.

What makes Surp Khach remarkable is simply that it is still here, and still holy. Where so many religious sites were lost outright, this one weathered its Soviet decades and remained standing, its medieval stonework preserved in the hush of the forest. It has reclaimed its role as an Armenian spiritual center and a place of pilgrimage, drawing visitors and worshippers back up into the hills much as it did in the fourteenth century. Its significance has even been recognized in modern currency, appearing on a commemorative silver coin. To arrive at Surp Khach today, after the long climb, is to stand before a building that has outlasted the empire that built it, the state that seized it, and the years that tried to make it something it was never meant to be.