Church of the Theotokos in Sozopol

Worth a detour

The Dormition church is the oldest building in the old town and the clearest thing in Sozopol to point at and explain. It is documented from 1482. Its eastern wall reaches street level and the rest of it is below, because Christian churches under Ottoman rule could not stand above a given height, so the builders got their volume by digging. The iconostasis inside is late eighteenth century and very good.

Story

Background

It began as a dependency of the monastery on St Ivan island and has been in use ever since. The sunken construction is the standard Balkan response to the rule about church heights, but Sozopol's is unusually legible: you can stand on the lane, see the roof at chest height, and then go down a flight of steps into a full-sized interior.

The iconostasis is the work of the Debar school of woodcarvers and dates from the late eighteenth century. It was declared a cultural monument of national significance separately from the building in 1967 — a rare distinction that tells you what the specialists think of it. Dated icons of 1781, 1782 and two of 1830 hang on it.

The building itself was listed in 1962. There are no published opening hours for any church in Sozopol, and the honest position is that you try the door: in July and August it is almost always open, in November it very often is not. A small charge is sometimes asked. It is a minute's walk from the Ethnographic Museum, and the two together plus the Archaeological Museum make the core of a morning in the old town before the day boats arrive.