Church of St John Aliturgetos

Worth a detour

Aliturgetos is the high point of the Nesebar style and a ruin. Fourteenth century, cruciform, eighteen and a half metres by ten, with four pairs of columns that once held a dome, and an eastern front of white stone and red brick worked into patterns that look like embroidery. Every facade is built differently. The 1913 earthquake took the roof and it was never put back. It costs nothing and it is above the harbour.

Story

Background

The name means the unconsecrated, and the usual explanation is that the liturgy was never celebrated here, though nobody can say why. What is certain is that it was built at the moment when this coast's masons were at their most inventive, and that they treated the walls as a field for pattern: alternating courses of dressed limestone and brick, ceramic plates set into the masonry, and motifs of mesh, chequer, sun and braid worked out in the tympana of the blind arches.

The eastern facade, with its three apses, niches and elegant arches, is the best preserved and the one to stand in front of. There are stone sculptures with plant ornament, forms drawn from the sea, and human figures, with garlands of clay bowls and quatrefoils above them.

The earthquake of 1913 did serious damage across the whole coast and this building took the worst of it in Nesebar. What is left is an open shell with the arcading still legible. It sits above the port next to the open-air amphitheatre on Ribarska Street, slightly off the main circuit, which means it is often empty when the churches in the centre are not. Late afternoon, with the sun coming round onto the east front from the south-west, is when the brickwork does what it was built to do.