Nesebar

Worth a detour

Forty churches were built on a peninsula you can cross in ten minutes. Come before nine, when the coaches from Sunny Beach have not arrived and the cobbles still belong to the people who live here. St Sophia stands roofless and open in the middle of town; several of the rest are shops now, and only some can be entered.

Story

Background

Dorians from Megara founded a colony here at the start of the sixth century BC, on a rock the Thracians were already using, and called it Mesembria. The peninsula is about 850 metres long and 350 wide, joined to the mainland by a narrow man-made isthmus with a wooden windmill sitting on it — which means the whole of the old town is a twenty-minute walk end to end.

Into that space something like forty churches were built and partly survive, spanning nine centuries. St Sophia, the old bishopric, is a roofless fifth-to-sixth-century basilica standing open in the middle of town. St Stephen keeps its wall paintings. Christ Pantocrator and St John Aliturgetos, both thirteenth or fourteenth century, are the ones people photograph: bands of brick and pale stone, blind arcading, ceramic discs set into the walls. Several are ruins, several are galleries or shops, and only some can be entered.

What the UNESCO inscription cannot protect is the atmosphere. The main street from the windmill is wall-to-wall stalls in season, and Sunny Beach is two kilometres away and sends coaches all day. The town is still worth it, but the timing is not optional: early morning, or the hour before dark when the day trippers have gone and the churches are lit.