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Nessebur is one of the few oldest known cities in Europe. Located on a tiny peninsula along the Black Sea coast, 30 km north of the city of Burgas, the old town communicates with the modern parts through a tiny stretch of land. Nowadays the old town measures merely 850 m in length and 350 m in width, as it has lost almost a third of its territory to the constant battle with the invading sea. The first evidence of human presence dates back to the end of the Bronze Age, i.e. more than 3 millennia ago. As early as in the 7th c. B.C. the Thracians built their first fortified settlement on the site by assembling stone blocks from the quarry without using any adhesives. It went down in history under the name of Messambria, and later Messemvria. In the 6th c. B.C. the settlement became a Greek colony surrounded by a fortified wall, whose impressive ruins have been dug out on the northwestern shore. The ancient city used to have its own theatre, a temple to Apollo, an agora, and used to mint its own gold, silver and bronze coins. The Roman legions of Marcus Luculus invaded it in 72 B.C. and the city survived within the confines of three Roman provinces Macedonia, Moesia and Thracia in succession. The temples to Aesculapius, Dionysus and Apollo are a vestige of those times, together with Hecate’s sanctuary and a few tombstones.

After the 4th c. A.D. the city’s development became closely dependent on Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, and at that time Nessebur used to be one of the most powerful cities in the Balkan Peninsula. The earliest Christian church built in the 5th c. St. Sophia, or the Old Metropolitan Church, Our Lady Eleusa church and the early Byzantine thermae and a 4th c. basilica with preserved murals of representations of human figures are a vestige of that time. In the early 7th c. Messemvria became the seat of the Bishopric and a well-fortified maritime port.

In 705 the Bulgarian Khan Tervel and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II struck an agreement and Nessebur became part of the territory of the newly founded Bulgarian state. It also became Bulgaria’s gateway to the world. For a short period it had been again annexed by Constantinople, but it was Khan Krum who won the port definitely for the Bulgarian state in 812, and ever since that year Nessebur has remained a Bulgarian town. The incredible spiritual, artistic, architectural and literary upsurge characteristic of Bulgaria’s Golden Age in the tenth century following the nation’s christening and the creation of the Slavonic script, left its mark on Nessebur, too. The St. Stefan basilica, whose walls have been richly decorated with 258 scenes and more than 1,000 human representations, is evidence of the former statement. During the Second Bulgarian Kingdom in the mid-14th c. Nessebur was an important commercial junction and construction of Orthodox churches was at its peak. This perhaps has given Bulgarian and foreign scholars a solid ground to call Nessebur the ‘Bulgarian Ravena’.

Attracted by the town’s riches the Crusaders led by Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, surnamed the Green Count after his habit of dressing in this colour and appear in state occasions surrounded by green-dressed escort, overtook Nessebur, whose residents fought the siege for 17 days. In 1453 the Ottoman troops took the city just as they had taken Constantinople.

In the times of the National Revival (18-19 c.) the typical two-storey houses with a ground floor built of undressed stone for the storing of foods, and a second one, protduring above the ground floor and built of wood, for the families, emerged. There are nearly 100 of them to this day and all of them had been duly restored forming picturesque house clusters along the narrow alleys of the old town. The old fortress wall and the Gate which gave access to the Old Town have also been restored.

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