Hagia Sophia Church

Worth a detour

The largest and oldest thing in Nesebar, and the only major church you can walk into whenever you like. Hagia Sophia is a three-nave basilica twenty-five and a half metres long, built at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries, rebuilt in the ninth, and without a roof since some time after the Ottoman conquest. It is free, it is unfenced, and at seven in the morning it is empty.

Story

Background

It stands on what is thought to be the old centre of the settlement, and the municipal guide says an ancient temple of Apollo stood here before it. The basilica went up in two building campaigns at the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century and was rebuilt at the start of the ninth, when the original marble colonnade was replaced by the masonry piers you see. Twenty-five and a half metres long, with a semicircular apse, a three-part narthex and an atrium.

The central nave is divided from the aisles by stone piers carrying brick arches, with a second arcade above them, and three arched windows over the apse light the east end. The synthronon — the stepped seating for the clergy behind the altar — survives in the apse. The interior was plastered and painted; none of that is left.

This was the bishop's church, which is why the town calls it the Old Metropolis, distinguishing it from St Stephen, the New Metropolis. The two are worth seeing in that order: this one for the scale and the light coming straight down into it, the other for what a Byzantine interior actually looked like when it was finished. There are cafés around the square and a good deal of tat, but the building is large enough to ignore all of it. The museum and the municipal guide give different construction dates, fifth century in one and turn of the sixth in the other, so treat the date as approximate.