Church of St Theodore

Worth a detour

One of the smaller Nesebar churches, single-naved with a narthex and an apse, of which the northern and western facades survive from the thirteenth century and the rest is later. The interest is entirely in those two walls: blind decorative arches in dressed stone and brick, with the panels below filled by staggered zigzag patterns. Ten minutes, free, on Neptun Street in the eastern part of the peninsula.

Story

Background

The museum gives its dimensions as eight point seven metres by four point one five, while the municipal guide says about eleven by four, so treat the size as small and the numbers as uncertain. The guide adds that the south and east walls are built of stone with santrachi — the horizontal wooden levelling beams set into Balkan masonry to absorb earthquake movement — and that the iconostasis is of the seventeenth century.

What is worth stopping for is the pattern-making. Nesebar's masons had a repertoire and they used it at every scale; here it is reduced to two walls and one motif, and the discipline of that is easier to read than the full display at Pantocrator. Stand back far enough to see the whole north wall at once.

The municipality says plainly that several of the better-preserved churches without murals have been turned into small art galleries run by local dealers, but it does not say which. St Theodore is one of the candidates, and the honest position is that you will find out by trying the door. There is no ticket and no published opening time. It is a couple of minutes off the main route through the old town, on the quieter eastern side, which is reason enough to walk over.