Nesebar Old Town audio guide: 20 stops

Welcome to the Old Town of Nesebar. You are standing on the narrow strip of land that links the rocky peninsula to the mainland. UNESCO describes the Old Town as an architectural ensemble that forms a harmonious whole with this peninsula, joined to the continent by a long, narrow stretch of land. The town has been on the World Heritage List since 1983: it was inscribed on 9 December 1983, at the seventh session of the World Heritage Committee in Florence.

People have lived on the peninsula since the end of the Bronze Age. The ancient Thracians called the settlement Melsambria, “the town of Melsas”, after its legendary founder and the Thracian word for town, “bria”. At the end of the sixth century BC Greek colonists of Dorian origin arrived, and Mesambria soon grew into a typical Greek city-state. In the early Middle Ages its name became Mesemvria, and later Nesebar.

The windmill in front of you is one of three that survive in Nesebar; the others stand on the north shore of the peninsula and at the start of the new town. In the nineteenth century, together with the houses of the Revival period, many windmills were built here to use the strong winds that blow over the peninsula almost all year round. This one is built of stone, with a wooden upper part. It is listed as a cultural monument of local importance. Built in the nineteenth century, it stood until 1929, when it collapsed in a storm. It was restored in 1964 from old photographs, and again by Nesebar Municipality in 2022 so that visitors can go inside. Today it houses the exhibition “The treasures of the ancient necropolis of Mesambria”, and its balcony looks out over the Old Town.

Walk on along the isthmus towards the walls. The next stop is the town gate.

Throughout the town’s long history, fortress walls and other defences were built here again and again to make the peninsula impregnable. In front of you is the Early Byzantine wall, and its best-preserved stretch is the one around the town gate. After the break-up of the Roman Empire, the rulers of Byzantium built busily, and in the middle of the fifth century new walls rose at Mesemvria in “opus mixtum” — alternating bands of stone and brick.

Around the gate the wall is faced with large stone blocks cut to a rectangular shape. The gate was flanked by two rectangular towers, and beside them semicircular and round towers were built symmetrically. Two doors, one that was lowered from above and one with two wings, closed the entrance tightly. In the same period a wall was also raised along the south-western shore, and it survives to this day.

These walls protected the town throughout the Middle Ages. They were badly damaged in attacks several times and quickly rebuilt. The first reconstruction dates from the late sixth and early seventh century, after an attack by the Avars. In 812, when Khan Krum captured Mesemvria, his troops destroyed the wall; at the end of the ninth century it was rebuilt in brick. The fortifications were repaired again in the middle of the eleventh century, and the walls were rebuilt for the last time under Tsar Ivan Alexander.

Krum’s capture was also the moment the town first became part of the Bulgarian state — after a fourteen-day siege, the museum notes. Slavs and Bulgarians settled here, and the Slavs called the town Nesebar. After Nesebar fell under Ottoman rule in 1453, the fortifications lost their purpose and, left without care, slowly fell into ruin.

Stand with your back to the gate and look north along the wall: there are traces of even older defences.

Beneath and beside the Byzantine masonry lie much older defences. The first known settlers of the peninsula, the Thracians, began to fortify their settlement around the eighth century BC. On the north-western shore archaeologists uncovered a wall from that time together with its gate. It is built of rough stones and mud and survives to a height of about two metres.

The Greek colonists who arrived at the end of the sixth century BC did not build a new fortification at once. They began only at the end of the fifth and the start of the fourth century BC, and some sections were added in the third century. They built with large stone blocks with dressed faces, laid in rows without mortar, and filled the core of the walls with rubble and earth. The line of the Greek wall has been traced in the western part of the town; in places it overlaps the later Byzantine wall.

When the Romans conquered Mesambria, the fortifications were left almost undamaged and stayed in use for centuries. According to Nesebar Municipality, the Romans took the town in 72 BC without resistance.

The town these walls protected was rich. Mesambria began to strike its own coins in the first half of the fifth century BC — silver drachms and obols, and later bronze — and at the height of its prosperity, in the third and second centuries BC, it also issued gold coins. It traded busily with the cities of the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean. The Greek city had its fortress wall, its residential quarters, temples, a gymnasium and a theatre, and its leading craft was metalworking.

Many of the finds from that time are in the Archaeological Museum, the next stop, just past the gate.

The Archaeological Museum of Nesebar was founded in 1956. Its first exhibition was set up in the church of St John the Baptist, which you will see later on this walk. In 1994 the museum moved into this building, designed for it by the architect Hristo Koev. Here is the exhibition “Nesebar through the ages”. It fills a foyer and four halls, and each hall shows a different stage in the town’s life, from ancient Mesambria to medieval Nesebar.

The foyer holds the diploma recording the inscription of Old Nesebar on the World Heritage List, on 9 December 1983, at the seventh session of the World Heritage Committee in Florence.

Among the monuments here is a tombstone that lay for many years in the floor of the small church of St Spas: the tombstone of the Byzantine princess Mataisa Kantakouzene Palaiologina.

The exhibition tells the story you are walking through. First the Greek city with its temples, gymnasium and theatre, its crafts and its coins. Then the Christian city: after the empire’s capital moved to Constantinople and Christianity became the official religion, Mesemvria built basilicas, new walls, a new water supply and public baths — the work of leading architects and builders of the empire, following the models of the capital. The town’s main church bears the name of St Sophia, as in Constantinople. And finally the medieval town, which passed between Bulgarian and Byzantine rule and flourished especially under Tsar Ivan Alexander.

The museum and several of the churches on this walk are run by the museum “Starinen Nesebar”; they are entered with a ticket, and the museum publishes its prices.

From here, walk down to the southern harbour.

Mesambria had two convenient harbours, a northern and a southern one. In both, the remains of the equipment of ancient ships are still being found.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Nesebar built up lively trade with the lands of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and with the principalities north of the Danube. The museum names Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Ancona and Dubrovnik among the cities Nesebar traded with in the Middle Ages.

Even after the town fell under Ottoman rule in 1453, economic and spiritual life did not stop. Churches were built and painted and icons were made in the town, and the harbour of Nesebar remained a principal centre of imports and exports on the Black Sea coast.

Behind you, along the south-western shore, runs a stretch of the Early Byzantine fortress wall that survives to this day.

The sea also keeps parts of the ancient town itself. In October 2026 Nesebar Municipality announced that it is preparing underwater tourist routes to show visitors the remains of the ancient town beneath the Black Sea; the municipality has yet to find the funding to build them.

Follow the shore eastwards. The next stop is the church of St John Aliturgetos.

The church of St John Aliturgetos — in Bulgarian “Neosveteni”, the Unconsecrated — was built in the fourteenth century. It is not well preserved and was damaged in the earthquake of 1913, yet the museum calls it the high point of church building in the Middle Ages.

It measures 18.50 by 10.25 metres. It is a cross-domed church with a square nave and a spacious narthex. In the middle of the nave, four columns carried a tall, narrow dome.

Its most characteristic feature, though, is its facades. Here the so-called picturesque style reached its highest development. The builders alternated white stone blocks with small red bricks and set ceramic bowls into the walls, and so created a whole range of ornaments — true multicoloured embroidery. Every facade is worked out differently. The preserved eastern facade is especially finely made, with its three articulated apses decorated with slender niches and elegant arcades.

Stand for a moment facing the eastern facade and look for the rhythm of the rows — stone, brick, ceramic — that you will meet again on the other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century churches of Nesebar.

The church was built at a time when the town was flourishing. According to the museum, Nesebar prospered especially under Tsar Ivan Alexander; new churches were built then, among them Christ Pantocrator and St John the Unconsecrated, and around the town monasteries were active as centres of hesychasm in Bulgaria.

Walk on uphill into the heart of the town, to the church of St Stephen.

The church of St Stephen, also called the New Metropolis, was built between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. In the sixteenth century it was lengthened to the west, and in the eighteenth century the narthex was added. It is a three-nave basilica: the central nave rises above the side naves and ends to the east and west in oval gables. It is built of stone blocks and bricks, and its builders reused many architectural pieces — cornices, capitals, reliefs — from Christian buildings destroyed earlier.

The church was first dedicated to the Mother of God, which is why its wall paintings tell her life. A donor’s inscription above the south door of the nave gives the year it was painted: 1599. More than a thousand figures appear in 258 compositions, with a whole cycle of the miracles of Christ. Differences in style show the hands of three masters: two worked in the eastern part of the nave and a third in the western part. In the early eighteenth century the Last Judgement was painted on the eastern wall of the narthex.

The church keeps a painted iconostasis from the end of the sixteenth century, and a carved bishop’s throne and pulpit from the end of the eighteenth. For its preserved architecture, its iconostasis and above all its wall paintings of high artistic quality, the museum ranks St Stephen among the most important monuments of Bulgarian cultural heritage.

Why “New Metropolis”? For almost all its history Nesebar was the seat of a metropolitan bishop. So two of its churches, St Sophia and St Stephen, are known as the Old and the New Metropolis.

The church is a museum site. Leave to the east, along Tsar Ivan Alexander Street.

In the eighteenth century a new economic revival came to Nesebar, and it shows above all in its renovated houses. Step by step the town took on a new face — the town of producers, fishermen and merchants who were prospering again.

Nesebar’s houses of this time have two storeys. The ground floor, with walls of stone and mud, was for work: it held the barrels of wine and all the tools of the vine grower, the fisherman or the craftsman. A narrow, steep staircase leads to the upper floor, where the rooms are arranged around a large hall: two or three for the family and their guests, and a kitchen with a pantry. The upper rooms are timber-framed, clad with boards outside and whitewashed inside.

The small, irregular plots tested the builders’ skill, and they met it with great ingenuity. The walls of the ground floor usually follow the uneven outline of the plot, while the upper floor is laid out in rectangles. Look up and compare the wooden upper floors with the stone walls below them.

More than a hundred Revival-period houses have been restored, and they form picturesque ensembles. One is here, along Tsar Ivan Alexander Street; its most interesting house has an upper floor whitewashed with lime mortar and a so-called “kobilitsa”. Another ensemble surrounds the Old Metropolis, and there are interesting houses around the church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel, which we will pass later.

UNESCO cites the different stages of the town’s vernacular architecture among the reasons Nesebar is World Heritage. It also notes that unauthorised changes to some of these buildings are beginning to threaten the traditional structure of the town.

Walk on north to the church of Christ Pantocrator.

The church of Christ Pantocrator — Christ the Almighty — was built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is one of the most remarkable and best-preserved medieval churches in Nesebar, and a typical example of the picturesque style in church architecture.

It is rectangular, 16 by 6.90 metres, with two entrances, from the west and from the south. To the east it ends in three small apses, richly profiled on the outside. Its proportions are markedly elongated. In the middle of the nave four slender columns, now gone, carried the dome. Above the narthex rises a square bell tower, reached from the south by a narrow stone staircase built into the wall between the nave and the narthex.

Look at the facades. Along their whole length runs a belt of tall, doubly recessed arches, and above them, in three rows, winds the characteristic decoration of ceramic bowls and four-leaf shapes. Above the apses on the eastern side runs a frieze of swastikas made of brick — a symbol of the sun cult. The richly decorated drum of the dome has eight arched windows, and light also enters through similar windows on the south and north facades. Under the floor of the small narthex lies a medieval tomb. Inside, only traces remain of the wall paintings that once covered the walls.

According to the museum’s page, the church houses a photo exhibition, “Nesebar and the bay in old maps (4th to 19th century)”. It shows eighteen maps — road, sea, continental, historical, trade maps and others — that illustrate the lasting interest in south-eastern Europe, the Black Sea coast and Nesebar.

The church is a museum site. The next stop is just to the east: St John the Baptist.

On its page about the monument, the museum dates the church of St John the Baptist to the tenth century; in its overview of the town’s history, to the eleventh. It is built of rough stone and mortar and measures 14 by 10 metres. Around the windows and above the door you can see the first touches of decoration in brick.

The church is a typical example of the transition from the short basilica to the cross-domed church. Above the centre rises a cylindrical drum topped by a hemispherical dome. To the east it ends in three semicircular apses. There is no narthex, and the west, north and south facades are each marked by one tall blind arch.

Inside, the church was plastered and painted. Two images survive: a donor’s portrait from the fourteenth century on the south wall, and a scene with St Marina from the seventeenth century on the south-western column.

In 2013, during the church’s restoration, rescue excavations showed that it stands on the foundations of a late antique three-nave basilica. At first that basilica had a single apse, semicircular inside and out; later two small semicircular apses were added to the south nave and probably to the north one. From its plan and the finds, the basilica can be dated to the sixth century.

This church was also the first home of the Archaeological Museum, founded in 1956. Today it is a museum site, and the municipality’s fee ordinance also provides for its use for cultural events and concerts. According to the museum, St Stephen and St John the Baptist became the prototypes of Nesebar’s later masterpieces of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Just a few steps to the north lie the ruins of the town’s baths — the Early Byzantine thermae.

The Early Byzantine thermae — the town’s public baths — were built in the sixth century, in the reign of Emperor Justinian I the Great, between 527 and 565. About two thirds of their area has been explored: five heated rooms, two of them with semicircular pools, a central hall and a corridor. The rest of the building lies under the neighbouring streets and houses.

The walls were built in “opus mixtum” — courses of stone alternating with bands of brick — and were faced with marble. In places they still stand up to three metres high. The heated rooms have a raised floor and a hypocaust, heating beneath the floor. The most imposing room is the central hall: four massive marble columns with Corinthian capitals carried a cross vault or a dome, and the floor was paved with marble.

Water arrived through a water pipe that entered the building from the west. In the fifth and sixth centuries a complex underground water system was built that covered the whole town — part of the great building wave after Christianity was adopted, which also brought the basilicas, the new walls and the baths.

The baths were used as baths until the end of the eighth century, and they were repaired during that time. At the beginning of the ninth century they were converted and used as dwellings and for household needs. Lime kilns were built in the central hall, and the marble slabs of the floor and walls were burned in them for lime.

Two Byzantine chroniclers, Theophanes the Confessor and Patriarch Nikephoros, record that in 680 Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatos bathed and took a cure here.

Across the way, to the east, is the small church of St Spas.

The church of St Spas — the Holy Saviour — is much later than the medieval churches we have seen. It has a single nave and a single apse and is 11.70 metres long and 5.70 metres wide. Once a narrow, long narthex ran along its whole north side, and with it the church was 9.80 metres wide. The roof is a wooden one with eaves, unlined inside. The eastern facade was half dug into the ground.

We know exactly when it was built. A donor’s inscription above the south entrance says the church was raised in 1609 at the expense of a wealthy citizen of Nesebar, in the time of Metropolitan Kiprian. This was the time of Ottoman rule — and this small church shows that churches were still being built and painted in the town.

Inside it was painted throughout by an unknown master at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The paintings tell episodes from the lives of Christ and the Mother of God. In the apse is the scene of the Mother of God “wider than the heavens”, with the Child.

For many years the tombstone of the Byzantine princess Mataisa Kantakouzene Palaiologina lay in the floor of this church. Today you can see it in the Archaeological Museum.

The church is a museum site. Walk on east to the church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel and the Revival-period houses around it.

The church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel is a single-nave, cross-domed church with a narthex, measuring 13.90 by 5.30 metres. On its page about the monument the museum dates it to the thirteenth century; in its overview of the town’s history, to the fourteenth.

The church ended in a wide dome, and to the west a square tower rose above the narthex. The small stone staircase that led up to it is hidden inside the west wall. Three doors lead in — one in the north wall into the nave and two into the narthex. To the east the church ends in three small polygonal apses with openings in them.

The outside decoration is rich. The arches are outlined with triple rows of green glazed bowls, and the spaces beneath them are filled with stone blocks laid like a chessboard and pairs of small bricks. The museum notes that the churches of this time — St Paraskeva, St Theodore and the Holy Archangels — have direct parallels in the architecture of the capital, Tarnovo.

Look around at the houses, too. This is one of the ensembles of Revival-period Nesebar. Among them stand out the Nakov house, with finely made eaves and cornices, and the Vardaliev house — the only three-storey house, with complex jettied upper floors.

The next stop is just a few metres to the east: the church of St Paraskeva.

The church of St Paraskeva dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It has a single nave and a narthex, measures 15 by 6 metres, and ends to the east in a five-sided apse. It is built of dressed stone and brick in alternating bands.

Along the north and south facades runs a row of blind arches whose tympana are richly ornamented. The motifs — herringbone, sun, zigzag, chessboard — are made of stone and brick. Above them, in bands, runs decoration of four-leaf and round glazed bowls set into the wall itself.

Today’s gabled roof is a legacy of later centuries. Originally the church rose in height as a typical cross-domed building: a cross expressed in the roof, and above it, in the centre, a drum with a dome. A bell tower stood above the narthex; the stone staircase built into the wall between the nave and the narthex is the evidence for it.

After restoration under the project “Faith in Nesebar”, the church works as a museum site. It houses the exhibition “Rescued wall paintings from Nesebar churches”. Here, for the first time, wall paintings are shown from the church of St George the Great, which was pulled down in 1958. It stood in the south-eastern part of old Nesebar, had a single nave and a narthex, and was built in 1704. Before it was demolished, its early eighteenth-century paintings were taken down, and most were moved to the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia. A small part stayed in Nesebar — and these are displayed here, together with some paintings removed from the church of St Clement.

Walk on east to the square in front of the Old Metropolis.

The basilica of St Sophia, called the Old Metropolis, stands on what is thought to have been the old centre of the town. It was built at the end of the fifth and the start of the sixth century. There were two building periods, and it took its present form at the beginning of the ninth century. The basilica was part of a complex — the residence of the metropolitan bishop of Nesebar. The museum notes that the central church of Mesemvria bears the name of St Sophia, just as in Constantinople, the empire’s new capital.

It is a three-nave basilica with one apse — semicircular inside and three-sided outside — with a narthex, an entrance hall, and an atrium, an inner courtyard. It is 25.50 metres long. The side naves are separated from the central one by rectangular stone pillars joined by brick arches, and a second arcade stood above them. In the east wall above the apse there are three arched windows. The gabled roof has not survived. In the apse the synthronon, the bench for the clergy, is almost wholly preserved. Inside, the basilica was plastered and painted, and the whole floor was covered with a mosaic of small coloured stones.

Stand on the north side of the basilica. Here are the foundations of another church, St Demetrius, uncovered during excavations in 1968. It was most probably built in the eleventh century, perhaps as a family church. It is cross-domed, square in plan, with three apses; the foundations of the four pillars that carried the dome survive.

For almost all its history Nesebar was the seat of a metropolitan bishop — which is why this basilica is the Old Metropolis, and St Stephen the New.

South of here, in one of the Revival-period houses, is the Ethnographic Museum.

The ethnographic exhibition “Old Nesebar” tells the story of the town from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. It is laid out in the Moskoyani house, built in 1840 by a wealthy Greek merchant.

The house has two storeys: a stone ground floor and an upper, living floor built mainly of wood. At the centre of the upper floor is the hall, with a richly decorated wooden ceiling and a star-shaped rosette in the middle. To the north are the bedroom, the pantry and the kitchen; to the south, two more rooms that were used mainly in summer.

In the hall, old photographs and plans show the rich architecture of Revival-period Nesebar and its landmark houses. There is also information about the town’s windmills. You can see engravings and descriptions by travellers who visited Nesebar between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, elegant women’s dresses from the early twentieth century and objects of everyday town life.

The south room is devoted to the traditional crafts and livelihoods of Nesebar — fishing, vine growing and winemaking. For the first time it shows a hoard of copper vessels and wine vessels from the eighteenth century found near the town, together with typical fishing gear.

The large north room shows the everyday life and customs of the town’s native population. It recreates the interior of a typical Greek house — with a fireplace, a low sofa, hand-woven covers and curtains. On display are an icon of 1669, part of a home iconostasis such as most Greek houses had, a bride’s costume from the early twentieth century and a wedding album.

The small north room is devoted to the settlers who came to Nesebar from Macedonia and Thrace, with a typical interior of their houses, a woman’s costume from the Enidzhe Vardar area, parts of men’s and women’s costumes and a collection of wrought belt buckles.

The museum is entered with a ticket. Walk on east to the church of St Theodore.

The church of St Theodore is small: a single nave with a narthex and one apse, 8.70 metres long and 4.15 metres wide. The museum assigns it to the fourteenth century.

Its facades are articulated by blind arches of dressed stone and brick. The spaces beneath the arches are filled with chessboard or zigzag ornaments made of small stone blocks and bricks. Take a moment to follow the patterns: you saw the same motifs on St Paraskeva and on the Holy Archangels.

The museum notes that these three churches have direct parallels in the architecture of the capital, Tarnovo. After nearly forty years of Byzantine rule, Nesebar was joined to the Bulgarian state again in 1304 by Tsar Todor Svetoslav. The town flourished especially under Tsar Ivan Alexander. The royal family and the tsar himself granted privileges to the monasteries of Nesebar and gave them rich gifts, and future Bulgarian patriarchs were educated in the monasteries around the town.

In 1366 the town was taken by the knights of Count Amadeus of Savoy and then handed over to the Byzantine emperor. It finally fell under Ottoman rule in 1453, together with Constantinople.

Now walk north to the shore, to the ruins of the sixth-century basilica of the Holy Mother of God Eleusa.

The basilica of the Holy Mother of God Eleusa — the Mother of God of Tenderness — stands on the north shore of the peninsula. It was built in the sixth century. It has three naves, three apses and a narthex, and each of the two side naves has two more small apses, to the north and to the south. The basilica is 28 metres long and 18 metres wide.

Look towards the sea: the north nave and part of the central nave have fallen into the water. UNESCO notes that the emergency stabilisation of the peninsula’s shoreline has also had a negative impact and could threaten the integrity of the site.

In the narthex, vaulted tombs survive. Archaeological excavations were carried out here in 1920, and today the basilica is conserved and partly restored.

Historical sources mention the church until the fourteenth century, when it was part of a monastery. That takes us to the monasteries that surrounded medieval Nesebar. The museum names several — of the Holy Mother of God, of Christ Akropolites, of St Peter, St Andrew, St Elijah, St Blaise and St Nicholas of Emona — as centres of hesychasm in Bulgaria. Some of Nesebar’s monasteries and their scriptoria, where books were copied, were still active in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The basilica lies open to the sea and the wind — the same wind that, centuries later, would turn the windmills of Nesebar. One of them is close by, further along the north shore.

Walk west along the shore path.

On the north shore of the peninsula is the second of Nesebar’s three surviving windmills. The third stands at the start of the new town, and the first you saw on the isthmus.

The windmills were built in the nineteenth century, together with the Revival-period houses. The people of Nesebar made very sensible use of the strong winds that blow over the small peninsula almost all year round. There are two kinds of mill. Some are built entirely of stone, cylindrical, with a conical wooden roof. Others have a cylindrical stone ground floor with a square or rectangular wooden room on top and a gabled roof. The big wooden sails always face the direction of the strongest winds.

This shore looked out to sea long before that. Mesambria had two convenient harbours, a northern and a southern one, and the remains of ancient ships’ equipment are still found in both. Further west, on the north-western shore, archaeologists uncovered a Thracian wall together with its gate, built of rough stones and mud — from around the eighth century BC, when the first known settlers of the peninsula began to fortify their settlement.

Stand facing the sea. In front of you is the open Black Sea, across which colonists, merchants and conquerors came for more than two and a half thousand years — and across which medieval Nesebar traded with Constantinople, Venice and Genoa.

One stop remains: a little to the south-west, by the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God.

You are standing by the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God — one of the seventeen sites marked on the map of landmarks of the museum “Starinen Nesebar”. Here our walk ends.

According to legend, Nesebar once had around forty churches. Today there are records of twenty-three of them. Because of its many well-preserved churches, especially from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Bulgarian and foreign scholars call the town “the Bulgarian Ravenna”. For almost all its history it was the seat of a metropolitan bishop — which is why two of its churches are known as the Old and the New Metropolis.

Let us gather the centuries we have walked through. The Thracians, who called the settlement Melsambria. The Dorian Greeks, who made it a city-state with coins, temples and a theatre. The Romans and the Christian empire, who built basilicas, walls and baths. Khan Krum, who joined the town to the Bulgarian state in 812. The flowering of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Pantocrator, Aliturgetos and Paraskeva rose. The knights of Amadeus of Savoy in 1366. Ottoman rule from 1453, under which the harbour and the churches lived on. And the Revival-period town of fishermen, vine growers and merchants, with its wooden houses and windmills.

In 1983 Old Nesebar was inscribed on the World Heritage List. UNESCO describes it as an outstanding testimony of many-layered cultural and historical heritage and as a living, developing town. It also warns of the pressure that tourism and unauthorised building put on it. In March 2026 a public discussion was held in Nesebar on the vision for the sustainable development of the Old Town up to 2045.

Thank you for walking with us. The way out is to the west — back to the gate and the isthmus.