Church of Saint Paraskevi

Worth a detour

What you are paying two and a half euros for is the outside: two rows of blind arcading, bands of brick alternating with stone, coloured ceramic discs set into the arches, and lunettes filled with herringbone and chequerwork. Inside there is neither dome nor bell tower — both gone — and the space is used as a gallery. Five minutes, unless the pictures detain you.

Story

Background

Most researchers put it in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, though a few argue for much earlier. The plan is simple: a single nave with a narthex at the west end and a five-sided apse at the east, roofed with a barrel vault carried on two arches. The walls use the pseudo-opus mixtum the Nesebar masons preferred, courses of dressed stone alternating with courses of brick and timber lacing buried inside.

The decoration is what makes it. Eight narrow blind arches to a row along the north and south walls and three across the west; archivolts ringed with coloured ceramic rosettes; lunettes filled with brick laid in fish-bone, sun, chequer and zigzag patterns. This is a small provincial church built by people who knew exactly what a kiln could do for them, and it is the clearest example of that skill in a town full of examples.

The dome and bell tower are long gone and a pitched roof covers the nave instead, so the silhouette is wrong and you should read the walls rather than the shape. It opens from April to mid-October along with the other small churches, and outside those months is shown only by arrangement through the archaeological museum.