St. Ivan Island lighthouse

Worth a detour

A white tower on the highest point of St Ivan island, nine hundred metres off Sozopol, and the only thing on the island still doing its job. It is not open and it is not the reason to take the boat — the monastery excavation is — but it is the landmark you steer by and the one fixed point in every view of the bay from the old town.

Story

Background

St Ivan is the largest island in Bulgaria's Black Sea, about sixty-six hectares, eight hundred and eighty metres by five hundred and ten, rising to thirty-three metres. The lighthouse stands at the top. Its keepers are the only people permitted to graze animals on the island under the protection order, which is the sort of detail that tells you how long someone has been living up there.

Sources give two different years for the tower, and both are right about something. A light was established here in 1884, put up by French engineers for the government of Eastern Rumelia — the autonomous Ottoman province that was folded into Bulgaria the following year, which is its own kind of dating evidence. The tower you see is not that one: it is reinforced concrete, a material that barely existed in 1884, and Bulgarian records date it to 1911 with its optic supplied by Barbier, Bénard et Turenne of Paris. So the station is from the 1880s and the building is from the 1910s.

There was a light here long before either. A second-century coin of Faustina the Elder shows one, and archaeologists have found the footings, which is why the island's museum interpretation claims a Roman predecessor.

Seeing it means either looking north from the Sozopol seafront, where it closes the view, or taking one of the boat trips out. The morning trip from Sozopol runs about two hours and includes a walk ashore; the sunset trip takes in St Cyricus and the old town from the water as well. The tower is not part of either — it is fenced working equipment — and the walk on the island goes to the monastery site instead, which is where the 2010 reliquary came from.