Nessebar sits on a small rocky peninsula that sticks out into the Black Sea, joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway, and the whole of the old town is an open-air museum. Greek colonists from Megara founded it in the sixth century BC, calling it Mesembria, and it passed through Thracian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian and Ottoman hands. Its position, with a good harbour and a defensible rock, made it a valued port for two and a half thousand years. UNESCO listed the old town in 1983.
The most striking monuments are the churches. At one time there were dozens on this tiny peninsula, and several survive in ruins or in good condition. The Church of Christ Pantocrator, from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has decorative bands of brick and stone and ceramic discs, the New Metropolis of Saint Stephen has beautiful frescoes, and the broken arches of the Old Metropolis, known as Saint Sophia, stand near the harbour. The houses on the cobbled lanes are in a style of the Bulgarian Revival, with a stone ground floor and an overhanging wooden upper storey, and the old wooden windmill on the seafront is a favourite photograph.
Be prepared for crowds. Sunny Beach, a huge resort with hotels and nightclubs, begins just up the coast, and in July and August the narrow lanes of the old town are packed with visitors and souvenir stalls. The best times are early spring, May and September, when the sea is warm and the town is calmer. Early mornings and evenings are lovely, with the light turning the stone gold and the water silver.
The causeway entrance is a bottleneck, and parking close to the old town is limited, so park on the new town side and walk across. Fuel is available in the new part of Nesebar and in the surrounding towns of Ravda and Sveti Vlas, and Burgas, the main city of the coast, is about half an hour south. The coast road is flat and busy in summer, with plenty of traffic, so those who want a good ride should head inland toward the hills of the Balkan range.
Fish is the obvious meal here, grilled or fried, with a shopska salad of tomato, cucumber and white cheese, and a glass of local wine or rakia. The ride heads inland to Sveshtari, in the north-east, where a Thracian tomb of the third century BC has remarkable carved figures and paintings.