Church of St Stephen

Worth a detour

If you go into one church in Nesebar, make it this one. A three-nave basilica of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, lengthened in the sixteenth and given a narthex in the eighteenth, and carrying a complete cycle of murals dated by inscription to 1599 — two hundred and fifty-eight scenes and more than a thousand figures, in the hands of three identifiable painters. It has been open to visitors since 1974.

Story

Background

The building is modest from outside: stone and brick, with spolia — cornices, capitals and reliefs robbed from earlier buildings — set into the walls, and oval pediments over the raised central nave at both ends. It was originally dedicated to the Mother of God, and Nesebar sometimes still calls it that.

Inside is the reason to come. The donor's inscription over the southern door of the nave dates the painting to 1599, and what it paid for covers almost every surface. Specialists can separate three hands, two working the eastern half of the nave and one the west. A Last Judgement was added on the eastern wall of the narthex in the eighteenth century, so the cycle spans two hundred years of a single congregation's taste.

The furniture matters too: a painted iconostasis, dated by the museum to the sixteenth century, and a carved wooden throne and pulpit of the eighteenth. Between them they show what the interior of a working Black Sea church looked like before the twentieth century emptied most of them.

Admission is about €4.50, roughly €2.50 for children, and combinations with the Archaeological Museum and the smaller churches bring the unit price down sharply — all six museum sites together cost about €18. Hours are the museum's own: nine to seven in high summer, nine to five in winter, every day. It is on Mena Street, a few minutes from the museum.