Ancient City of Nessebar

Nessebar stands on a small rocky peninsula on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. The Thracians were the first to settle here, and many Bronze Age objects have been found. Strabo recorded the legend that a Thracian named Mena founded the town, which took from him its first name, Menebria. At the beginning of the 6th century BC Dorian colonists from Megara turned it into the Greek colony of Mesembria, and according to Herodotus the city already existed by 513 BC.

Most of the surviving remains are Hellenistic: the acropolis, a temple of Apollo, the agora and, on the north side of the peninsula, part of a Thracian wall. The city came under Roman rule in 71 BC but kept the privilege of minting its own coins. When the Roman Empire split in 395 it passed to Byzantium, and as one of the strongest fortresses on the western Black Sea it was fought over by Byzantines and Bulgarians. In 812 the Bulgarian Khan Krum took it after a two-week siege.

Until the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the town filled with churches: the Stara Mitropolia, a large basilica without a transept, the Nova Mitropolia, founded in the 11th century and embellished until the 18th, and a series of 13th- and 14th-century churches such as St Theodore and St Paraskeva. Nessebar declined under Ottoman rule, but in the 19th century it gained the wooden houses typical of the Black Sea coast. It grew into a seaside resort from the early 20th century; a new town was built after 1925 and the old town restored, and it was inscribed in 1983.