Nesebar
— — old stone churches above a working harbour.
Not only on a wall.
“An ancient town on a rocky peninsula joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, halfway down Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. Founded by Greek colonists as Mesembria in the sixth century BC, then Byzantine, then Bulgarian, then Ottoman. The Old Town keeps more than forty medieval churches in a few hundred metres of cobbles, with wooden Revival houses leaning over them. from the studio
Nesebar, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nesebar lies on a small rocky peninsula on the western Black Sea coast, about 35 kilometres north of Burgas in Bulgaria's Burgas Province. The Old Town occupies a headland connected to the mainland by an isthmus only a few hundred metres wide. The Greek colony of Mesembria was founded here in the sixth century BC by Dorian settlers, and the town passed through Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Ottoman rule before becoming a Bulgarian resort. The Ancient City of Nesebar was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1983.
More than forty churches are recorded within the Old Town walls, of which around a dozen survive in legible form. They include the eleventh-century Church of Saint Stephen, the fourteenth-century Church of Christ Pantokrator with its bands of brick and stone and ceramic rosettes, and the partly ruined fifth-century Old Metropolitan Church of Saint Sophia. The Bulgarian Revival houses above them, mostly nineteenth century, are built of stone on the ground floor and timber on the upper, with the timber storey oversailing the lane below.
The Old Town is reached by a short causeway from the modern resort of Nesebar on the mainland; cars are restricted at the gate and the lanes are best walked. The Archaeological Museum near the entrance holds Hellenistic and Byzantine finds from the Mesembrian necropolis, including coins from the Mesembrian mint of the fifth century BC. Local boats run along the coast to Sunny Beach and Pomorie in season, and a wooden windmill on the isthmus is the most photographed object in the town.