Nesebar is the historic gem of Bulgaria's Black Sea coast: an ancient town perched on a small rocky peninsula, a maze of cobbled lanes, wooden houses and dozens of Byzantine and medieval churches that earned it the nickname 'the town of 40 churches'. With more than 2,500 years of history, its old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most fascinating urban ensembles in the Balkans.
Founded by Greek colonists as Mesambria and later Roman, Byzantine and Bulgarian, Nesebar piled up layer upon layer of history in a tiny space. Today you can wander among its churches of brick and decorated stone, such as St Stephen (the 'new church', with more than a thousand painted figures), the Basilica of St Sophia or the Church of Christ Pantocrator, between houses from the Bulgarian National Revival period with wooden upper floors leaning out towards the sea.
This guide covers Nesebar from a practical angle: which churches and monuments to see and how much admission costs, how to get there from Burgas, Sunny Beach or Varna, when to go to dodge the summer crowds, and how to combine the visit with the beach. An open-air museum on the Black Sea, where Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Bulgarians left their mark one on top of the other.
Nesebar is one of the oldest towns in Europe. Its peninsula was first home to a Thracian settlement called Melsambria, and in the 6th century BC Dorian Greek colonists founded the city of Mesambria, a thriving Black Sea trading colony that minted its own coins. It later became Roman and, above all, a major Byzantine centre: between the 5th and 14th centuries dozens of churches were built here, many of which still survive, making it famous as 'the town of 40 churches'. It changed hands several times between Byzantium and the medieval Bulgarian empires, until it fell under Ottoman rule at the end of the 14th century. Its wooden houses were built during the Bulgarian National Revival. In 1983 UNESCO declared its old town a World Heritage Site. We tell the whole story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Black Sea shore was colonised by the Greeks 2,600 years ago and holds everything from the Thracian gold of Varna to the Byzantine churches of Nesebar, among old fishing towns and modern resorts.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On the southern Black Sea coast, a small rocky peninsula joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus offered almost perfect shelter: surrounded by water, easy to defend and with a natural harbour. It's no surprise that people settled there very early on. The first settlement we know of was Thracian, and its name — Melsambria — combined, according to scholars, the name of a local chief, Melsas, with the Thracian word for 'town' (bria). That name shows that, before the Greeks arrived, there was already an organised community here.
The big leap came at the end of the 6th century BC (around 510 BC), when Dorian Greek colonists — mainly from Megara, Byzantium and Chalcedon — founded the city of Mesambria (Mesembria) on the peninsula. Like so many Greek colonies on the Black Sea, it prospered through trade: it exported grain, wine, honey and salt, traded with the Thracians inland and with the whole Greek world, and even minted its own silver and bronze coins, bearing symbols such as the helmet and the wheel. Mesambria built walls, temples dedicated to Apollo and other gods, a theatre and a fully Hellenic civic life.
For centuries it was one of the most important poleis on the western coast of the Pontus Euxinus, a rival and neighbour of other colonies such as Apollonia (today's Sozopol) and Odessos (Varna). Its island-like setting protected it, and its harbour made it rich: the foundations of the Nesebar we admire today were laid back then.
With Roman expansion across the Balkans, Mesambria came into Rome's orbit without losing its prosperity; it remained an active port and a city of Greek tradition within the empire. But it was under Byzantium — the Eastern Roman Empire, Rome's heir after the fall of the western half — that the city enjoyed its second golden age and forged the identity that makes it famous: the city of churches.
Between the 5th and 6th centuries, by then fully Christian, Mesambria became the seat of a bishopric and began to fill up with churches. The great basilica of Hagia Sophia, the 'Old Metropolis', was built at that time as the city's cathedral. Over the following centuries, and above all during the Middle and Late Byzantine heyday, dozens more churches went up, many of them small but richly decorated, with that architecture of alternating bands of stone and brick, blind arches, rosettes and glazed ceramic friezes that became a local hallmark. The churches of Christ Pantocrator, St John Aliturgetos and the Holy Archangels are examples of this Nesebar 'school'.
The city is said to have had around forty churches at one point, hence its nickname 'the city of 40 churches'. This extraordinary density of churches in such a small space, built up over a thousand years, is what makes Nesebar unique in the Eastern Christian world.
During the Middle Ages, the peninsula was a hotly contested prize. With the arrival of the Slavs and the founding of the Bulgarian state, the city — now with the Slavic form of its name, Nesebar — was caught in the tug of war between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgarian empires. It changed hands again and again over the centuries.
In 812, the Bulgarian khan Krum took the city after a siege, bringing it into Bulgaria for the first time. It later returned to Byzantium, and over the following centuries it passed repeatedly from one power to the other. In the 14th century, during the Second Bulgarian Empire, Nesebar was an important stronghold and the stage for the wars between the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Alexander and the Byzantine emperor: it was precisely in that period of splendour and conflict that many of its most beautiful churches, such as the Pantocrator, were built or decorated.
Each change of ruler left its mark on the city, but none erased the one before: the layers kept piling up, church upon church, wall upon wall. This continuity — Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Bulgarian — without major destruction is part of what makes the whole site so valuable. The medieval city lived alongside the ruins of the ancient one, and life went on in the same maze of streets on the rocks.
At the end of the 14th century, the Ottoman advance through the Balkans also reached the Black Sea coast, and Nesebar fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, where it would remain, like the rest of Bulgaria, for almost five centuries. Under the Ottomans, the city lost its political and military importance and was reduced to a quiet fishing and trading port, inhabited mainly by Christian Greeks and Bulgarians who kept the tradition of the churches alive, although many fell out of use or into ruin.
It was during this period, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, at the time of the Bulgarian National Revival (Vazrazhdane) and the commercial flourishing of the Christian communities on the Black Sea, that Nesebar's characteristic houses were built: two-storey homes with a stone ground floor, used for storerooms and cellars, and a wooden upper floor with bay windows (erker) jutting out over the street and the sea. This ensemble of wooden houses, mixed in with the old churches, defines the look of the old town today.
Nesebar's fishing and seafaring population lived off the sea and coastal trade. Many families were of Greek origin, and in fact, after Bulgaria's liberation and the population exchanges of the early 20th century, much of that Greek community emigrated, giving the city its present, mostly Bulgarian, make-up.
After the liberation of 1878, Nesebar became part of Bulgaria, first within autonomous Eastern Rumelia and then within the Bulgarian state. For much of the 20th century it remained a small, picturesque and somewhat out-of-the-way fishing village, which paradoxically helped its old town survive without the transformations that swept away other historic centres. Archaeologists and conservators began to appreciate the treasure represented by that accumulation of churches and houses.
International recognition came in 1983, when UNESCO added the Ancient City of Nessebar to the World Heritage List, for its unique testimony to more than two millennia of history and its exceptional ensemble of medieval Black Sea architecture. At the same time, the growth of mass tourism on the Bulgarian coast — with the huge resort of Sunny Beach (Slanchev bryag) springing up a few kilometres away — completely transformed the local economy.
Today Nesebar leads a double life. In summer, its old town fills with visitors arriving from Sunny Beach, Burgas and Varna, and the narrow streets are packed with souvenir shops and fish restaurants; it's worth getting there early or staying until sunset to enjoy it at a calmer pace. But beneath all the bustle, one of Europe's oldest cities still beats on: a maze of stone and wood on the rocks, where a Byzantine church appears at every turn and the Black Sea surrounds, just as it did 2,500 years ago, the old peninsula of Mesambria.
