The Nessebar school
Banded stone and brick with ceramic dishes set in the wall.
Chrumps โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Alexander Murvanidze โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท karel291 โ CC BY 3.0 ยท karel291 โ CC BY 3.0
Both are old towns on Black Sea peninsulas and they are always compared. **Nessebar** is clearly the more important historically โ on the World Heritage list, with Byzantine churches that have no equal โ but it is more crowded and more commercialised, and the coaches from neighbouring Sunny Beach unload thousands into it daily in summer. **Sozopol** is the finer town, quieter and with more local life, and its timber houses are better preserved, but it has less to see. With one day and an interest in history: Nessebar, very early. For a beautiful evening: Sozopol.
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Old Nessebar is on the World Heritage list and stands on a **small peninsula** joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway four hundred metres long โ and that separation is what preserved it. It is three thousand years old: a Thracian settlement called Menebria, then the Greek colony of Mesembria, then Byzantine, then Bulgarian, then Ottoman. What remains of all that is an extraordinary density: **more than forty churches** were built on this small rock, of which about ten or more survive in varying states. The architectural style here is distinctive and is called the Nessebar school: walls in **alternating bands of white stone and red brick**, blind arcading, and green ceramic dishes set into the wall as ornament. The most important are the Church of Christ Pantocrator and St Stephen's with its complete wall paintings. Above the stone base stand nineteenth-century timber houses with overhanging upper floors. Note: **Nessebar is exhaustingly crowded in July and August** โ coach traffic from the neighbouring resorts. Go early or out of season.
Banded stone and brick with ceramic dishes set in the wall.
Overhanging upper floors above stone bases.
Nessebar peninsula, Black Sea coast