Mesembria

Worth a detour

Everyone photographs the churches and walks past the walls, which is the wrong way round. At the isthmus, where the peninsula narrows to a few dozen metres, three defensive systems lie on top of each other: an eighth-century BC Thracian wall, a Greek one of the fifth to third centuries in massive dry-laid blocks, and the fifth-century AD Byzantine gate with its flanking towers. It costs nothing and it is the first thing you reach.

Story

Background

The peninsula is eight hundred and fifty metres long and three hundred and fifty wide, and it has been inhabited for more than three thousand years. The Thracians called the place after a founder named Melsas — Melsambria, the town of Melsas, bria being their word for town. Their wall, of hewn stone set in mud, still stands two metres high in places.

Dorian Greeks arrived at the end of the sixth century BC and rebuilt the defences at the end of the fifth and into the third, using large polished blocks laid without mortar over a rubble core. The town became a proper polis with a gymnasium and a theatre and struck its own silver from the first half of the fifth century, bronze later, and gold at its height in the third and second. Rome took it without a fight in 72 BC.

The visible gate is Byzantine, from the middle of the fifth century AD, built in opus mixtum — alternating courses of stone and brick — and faced with squared blocks. Two rectangular towers flank it, with round and horseshoe towers spaced along the wall beyond, and there were two gates, one a drawbridge. Khan Krum took the town in 812 after a fortnight and pulled the wall down; it was rebuilt in brick, repaired repeatedly, and finally reconstructed under Tsar Ivan Alexander. Parts of the southern circuit lie underwater. The site has been a national reserve since 1956 and on the World Heritage list since 1983.