Pomorie Monastery

Worth a detour

St George's is a working monastery on the landward side of Pomorie with one of the better founding stories in Bulgaria, and a holy spring at the heart of it. It is free, it takes half an hour, and on 6 May — the saint's day and the town's holiday — it holds a liturgy and a three-day fair that draws people from across Thrace.

Story

Background

The monastery's own account runs like this. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a Turk called Selim Bey settled at Anchialos with a large estate and fell incurably ill. A farmhand of his, an old man named Neno, dreamed of a spring of miraculous water in the yard and saw a young man on a white horse who kept returning. Digging in secret at the spot he uncovered a marble relief of St George, and water came out of the ground. The bishop sprinkled Selim Bey from the spring; he recovered, converted with his household, and built a chapel. Widowed later, he took vows, became the monastery's first abbot, and gave it his entire estate of three thousand eight hundred decares.

A new church was built in 1856 and the old one still stands under its roof. The twenty-metre bell tower dates from 1966. The monastery holds icons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the patronal icon was painted by Temistokal Diamandopulo, an Anchialos man.

Bulgarian Wikipedia puts Selim Bey a century earlier and the church two years later, which is a reminder that a legend recorded by the house that benefits from it is not a chronicle. Go anyway: the courtyard is calm, the ayazmo is still there, and the 6 May gathering is a genuine survival rather than a folklore show. Rooms in the monastery wings can be had by arrangement with the abbot; pilgrims are lodged free on condition of keeping the rule and doing the work.