Sozopol Old Town

Worth a detour

Nesebar has the churches and the coaches; Sozopol has the houses and, in the right month, the quiet. The old town covers a small peninsula of cobbled lanes where timber upper floors overhang stone ground floors, and the register lists a hundred and nineteen houses as cultural monuments. Come before nine or after seven, and eat one street back from the water.

Story

Background

Milesian settlers founded Apollonia here around 610 BC, the oldest town on this coast. In the late sixth century they raised a bronze Apollo thirteen metres high by the sculptor Kalamis in his temple on the island; the Romans took it to Rome after sacking the city in 72 BC and it has never been seen since. In the fourth century AD the name changed to Sozopolis, the city of salvation, and the place became an early and durable Christian centre. The peninsula is called Skamni.

What you walk through now is later: the Black Sea town house of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a stone ground floor for storage and a wooden upper floor jettied out over the street, clad in dark boards, with bay windows and a vine. The old part was declared an architectural and historical reserve in 1974, and the state register today lists two hundred cultural values within the town, a hundred and nineteen of them houses, with a further forty-nine buildings protected for their contribution to the shape of the streets.

The practical advice is about timing rather than about sights. Sozopol in August receives more people than it can absorb, and the seafront tavernas trade on the view rather than the fish. Arrive early, walk the perimeter path along the southern rocks, look at the Dormition church sunk below street level and the granary under the southern wall, and take lunch inland. In late September the same town is a different and much better place.