Church of the Holy Saviour

Worth a detour

St Spas is the other painted interior in Nesebar and the cheaper one. A single-nave church of 1609, eleven point seven metres by five point seven, built below street level with its eastern facade half in the ground, and frescoed throughout by an anonymous master in the early seventeenth century. Scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin, with the Virgin Platytera in the apse. About €2.50.

Story

Background

The commemorative inscription above the southern entrance records that a wealthy citizen of Nesebar paid for it in 1609, in the time of Bishop Kiprian, on the ruins of an older church. It is deliberately unassuming from outside — a wooden roof with eaves and no edging, a body dug into the slope — because that was the safe way to build a Christian church under Ottoman rule.

Inside, the painting has survived well. The cycle runs through the life of Christ and the Virgin, with the Virgin Platytera, the orant with the Child in a medallion at her breast, filling the apse. A long narrow narthex once ran along the northern side, taking the total width to nearly ten metres; it is gone.

The church kept, for a long time, the tombstone of Mataissa Cantacuzina, a Byzantine princess buried in Nesebar. It is now in the Archaeological Museum and is one of the better things there. Admission to the church is about €2.50, half that for children, and it is cheaper still as part of a combined ticket — St Stephen and St Spas together cost about €6, and all six museum sites about €18. It is on Briz Street. In winter it opens only if you ask at the museum first.