Nos Foros

Worth a detour

Burgas has a Latin name and this is where it comes from. On the Foros peninsula, opposite the Poda birdwatching centre on the Sozopol road, are the remains of a Roman fortification set up in the middle of the second century to guard the channel between Lake Mandra and the sea. It is free, there is parking, and it takes twenty minutes — but it is a site for people who like reading ruins rather than looking at them.

Story

Background

The fortification was built under Antoninus Pius, around the middle of the second century AD, at the point where Mandra drained into the bay. Its purpose was navigational as much as military: a tower with a fire on top to guide boats into the lagoon and keep them off the shallows. A second-century inscription, now in the Burgas archaeological museum, records that burgi — fortified towers — were built along the borders of the Roman colony of Deultum, and the word is where the city's name is generally thought to come from.

Medieval charts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century show the place as Poro or Poros, the strait. It served as the port of Deultum, which lay inland. Excavation only began in 2008, and archaeologists found what is taken to be the tower shown on the modern coat of arms of Burgas.

The spot has one more claim. In 1304, at the bridge over the Mandra outflow — the place the chroniclers call Skafida — Tsar Theodore Svetoslav defeated a Byzantine army, in a campaign that brought Rusokastro, Mesembria, Anchialos, Sozopol and Agathopolis under Bulgarian control. Nothing on the ground says so. Come here because you are already at Poda, which is across the road and much the better visit, and give the ruins the twenty minutes they merit.