Nesebar is the modern incarnation of the ancient Greek colony of Mesambria, and its tiny old quarter is a maze of medieval churches and 18th-Century mansions which have earned it a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Among the decorative brick façades, the wooden bay projecting windows and the tourists from the nearby Sunny Beach resort, Nesebar has preserved a piece of the late Roman grandeur. Built in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, the so-called Old Bishopric is 25-metre-long shell of a building, the erstwhile city's main church.
The Old Bishopric is now a tourist attraction
It had three-nave and was decorated with mosaics. The basilica stood in the town square, probably over the ruins of a pagan temple, and was thoroughly reconstructed in the 10th century. Its greatest treasure was the holy relics of St Theodore. In 1257, they were stolen by Venetians during the sack of Nesebar and taken to the Serenissima. By the end of the 18th century the church was abandoned, and religious life concentrated in a number of later, medieval churches which fill the town's narrow streets.
The best-preserved parts of the fortification wall, around the city's main gate and the southwestern shore, are also from the late Romans. They were built in the 5th Century AD.
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