Ancient City of Nessebar in Bulgaria

Ancient City of Nessebar in Bulgaria 

Short Report

Located on a rocky peninsula on the Black Sea, the more than 3,000 year old site of Nessebar was originally a Thracian settlement (Menebria).  At the beginning of the 6th century BC, the city became a Greek colony. The city remains, mainly from the Hellenistic period, the acropolis, the temple of Apollo, a agora and a wall, from the Thracian fortifications. Among other monuments, the Stara Mitropolia Basilica and the fortress dating back to the Middle Ages, when this was one of the most important Byzantine towns on the west coast of the Black Sea. Wooden houses, built in the 19th century are typical of the Black Sea architecture of the period.

Wonderful Universal Importance

The ancient city of Nessebar is a unique example of a synthesis of the ancient human activities in the field of culture; it is a place where many civilisations have left tangible traces in one homogeneous whole, integrating perfectly in nature. The various stages of the development of the residential common architecture reflects the various stages of its formation and development of the architecture in the Balkans and in the entire eastern Mediterranean region. The urban structure contains elements from the second millennium BC, since ancient times and the middle ages. The medieval religious architecture, amended by the setting of the traditional Byzantine forms, illustrates ornamental ceramics art, the characteristic paintings in this age. The city has more than thousands of years remarkable spiritual hearth of the Christian culture.

Wide Report

Systematic archaeological studies, reinforcement, restoration and conservation retain the material traces of history in Nessebar more than anywhere else. The small peninsula is a meeting point of times gone by. Nessebar is repeatedly shown important historic position of a frontier city on the outposts of a threat of empire. Thousands of years of continuous human occupation (the earliest traces of human settlement dating back more than 3000 years ago) have an impressive cultural occupation low as thick as 6 m in some places. Limited to a rocky promontory of the Bulgarian coast, Nessebar is a rich city-museum with more than three thousand years of history. The Thracians were the first to draw attention to this natural defensive, supported by many discoveries of Bronze Age objects. Strabo records, moreover, the legendary foundation by the Thracian, Mena, of whom the city has its original name, Menebria. Dorian settlers from Megara one of the oldest Greek colonies of a Design Euxinus (Black Sea) under the name Messembria: according to Herodotus was already in 513 BC.

Nessebar is nestled in a romantic isthmus. The cobbled streets, well kept medieval churches and half-timbered houses from the 19th century illustrate its checkred history. Nessebar churches can best be described as a cross between Slavic and Greek Orthodox architecture and are some of the most beautiful in the area. One of the oldest cities in Europe, it still exudes the spirit of different ages and populations - Thracians, Hellenes, Romans, slaves, Byzantines and Bulgarians.  

The Greek city, whose acropolis rose on the eastern end of the peninsula, was defended on the landward side of a 6th-century wall which is still partly in the north. Remains of the agora, the theater and the Temple of Apollo came to light in buildings in the period when Messembria fell under Roman influence. The city was in 71 BC, but continue to enjoy many privileges, such as that year its own coins. At the death of Theodosius (395) made the gap with the Roman Empire, Messembria became the Byzantine domain and not long after was one of the main strongholds of the Eastern Empire and the object of a power struggle between the Greeks and Bulgarians. He was successively in the hands of one first and then the other, depending on the profitability of each army, to 812 when the Bulgarian Khan Krum seized after a siege of two weeks.

Until the recording by the Turks in 1453 Nessebar consists of monuments of exceptional quality: for example, the Stara Mitropolia, a large basilica without transept rebuilt in the 9th century, the Church of the Virgin; the Nova Mitropolia, founded in the 11th century and continuously further embellished until the 18th century, the Church of St John the Baptist, Which houses the archaeological museum; and finally a remarkable range of 13th- and 14th-century churches: St Theodore, St Paraskebba, St Michael and St Gabriel and St John Alituhgethos. Other notable churches are the old bishop's palace in an early Byzantine style (4TH- 5th century), and the New bishops Residence (St Stefan), containing valuable 12th-century frescoes.

The Turkish domination coincided with the decrease in Nessebar, but he did not affect the monumental heritage, enriched in the 19th century by numerous houses in the 'Plovdiv style'.  This common architecture for the cohesion of the urban fabric of high quality. Nessebar's National Revival houses with stone foundations and wide wooden roof parapet, which overhang narrow cobbled streets directly on the sea, are also remarkably beautiful.

Source:whc/unesco