Church of Christ Pantocrator

Worth a detour

Pantocrator is the picture everyone takes home from Nesebar and deserves to be. Thirteenth or fourteenth century, sixteen metres by not quite seven, with three profiled apses, a bell tower over the narthex and facades worked in tall blind arches, rows of glazed ceramic saucers and four-leafed flowers, and a brick swastika frieze running above the east end. Look at the outside; the inside is largely bare.

Story

Background

The plan is rectangular with two doors, south and west, and four columns in the nave that once carried a dome now gone. A stone stair built inside the wall between nave and narthex led up to the rectangular bell tower. A medieval tomb lies under the narthex floor. The drum is richly decorated and pierced by eight arched windows.

What makes the building is the surface. Nesebar's late churches are the high point of a Balkan style that treats a wall as something to embroider: courses of white stone and red brick alternating, blind arcades whose tympana are filled with zigzag and chequerboard, and glazed ceramic discs set into the masonry so that the whole thing catches the light. The swastika frieze over the apses is a solar motif and has nothing to do with the twentieth century.

Inside, only traces of the original painting survive, and the space is used for exhibitions — most recently a display of eighteen maps of Nesebar and the bay from the fourth to the nineteenth century. That exhibition is described as open daily until the end of October, but the church does not appear in the museum's price list or its published opening hours, so ask at the Archaeological Museum rather than relying on finding it open. It stands on Mitropolitska Street in the middle of the old town, on the walk everybody takes.