Sozopol

People lived here in the Bronze Age, and the anchors found in the bay show that ships used it from the second millennium BC. In the 7th century BC Greek colonists from Miletus founded a town called Antheia, soon renamed Apollonia after its temple of Apollo. It grew into one of the largest and richest Greek colonies on the Black Sea, trading with the Odrysian kingdom of the Thracians and with Athens, Corinth and the Aegean islands, and a famous rival of Mesembria, today's Nesebar. In the 5th century BC the city raised a colossal statue of Apollo, 13 m tall, by the sculptor Calamis, and its coins carried an anchor as the city's symbol.

Apollonia kept its independence under Philip II and Alexander the Great, but in 72 BC Roman legions under Marcus Lucullus sacked it and carried the statue off to Rome. The town never fully recovered. By the 1st century AD the name Sozopolis appears; bishops are recorded from 431, and the town passed in turn between Byzantine, Bulgarian and Ottoman rule, the Ottomans taking it in 1453.

Into the early 20th century the population was almost entirely Greek. After anti-Greek violence in Bulgaria in 1906, Greek institutions were closed, and after the Balkan Wars nearly all remaining Greeks were exchanged for Bulgarians from Eastern Thrace; many settled in Chalkidiki, founding a new Sozopolis there. The town became a large fishing centre with its own fishing school, and later one of the country's main seaside resorts.

The Apollonia arts festival, held every September since 1984 and named after the ancient city, is Sozopol's best-known event: a programme of theatre, exhibitions, films, music, dance and book presentations. The old town's houses, built of timber over stone ground floors in the 18th and 19th centuries, give the place a character of its own, and the woodcarving of its church iconostases is a remarkable accomplishment of its craftsmen.

Archaeology is part of local life. Excavations in the old town since 2010 have uncovered the ancient walls, temples and shrines, and in 2012 they found the grave of a medieval man with an iron bar driven through his chest — a precaution against his return as a vampire, of a kind found in more than 100 medieval burials across Bulgaria. A proposal to rebuild the colossal statue of Apollo was revived in 2016 but criticised by the Orthodox Church and has not gone ahead.

The Church of St George keeps particles said to come from the Holy Cross and relics attributed to the apostle Andrew, and around twenty small chapels were raised on the foundations of the town's destroyed medieval churches, several of which survive. Fishing traditions survive around the harbour, and on St Nicholas's Day the traditional Bulgarian meal is fish, usually carp. The local football club is FC Sozopol.

About 6,400 people lived in Sozopol at the end of 2019, making it the eighth-largest settlement in Burgas Province and the centre of a municipality of the same name. The population swells in summer, when visitors fill guesthouses and campsites around the town.

Tourism is the main source of income, and the busiest months run from May to September. Many residents let rooms, run restaurants, cafés and shops, or work in hotels, and taxi drivers rely largely on visitors for their trade. Besides the yacht harbour, the town has piers for fishing boats, and its port, north of the old town, is of regional importance. Sozopol has no railway and only limited access to the national road network. It has a secondary school, and besides the football club, a rowing club.

Out of season the town returns to the slower pace of a small fishing port. Stretches of sand dunes and the Kolokita peninsula are protected areas within the town's bounds.

Sozopol's kitchen is built on fish. Restaurants such as Kirik, named after the island, serve marinated fish, mackerel roasted with lemon and fennel, octopus salad and clams, and grilled fish, both saltwater and freshwater, belongs to the Bulgarian grill. Mussels in butter, cooked with onion and fresh herbs, are a dish traditionally associated with Sozopol, and fisherman's soup, ribena chorba, is spiced with thyme and fresh lovage.

The town was known as a fishing and wine centre and played an important part in the grain trade from Thrace, and the national table fills out the rest of the menu: tarator, a cold soup of cucumbers, garlic, yogurt and dill; shopska salad of cucumbers, onions, peppers and tomatoes with white cheese; and from the bakeries banitsa, filo pastry with egg and sirene cheese, and mekitsi, deep-fried dough with jam, honey or cheese.

Rakia is the everyday spirit, and Zagorka and Kamenitza are national lagers. On St Nicholas's Day the traditional dish is fish, usually carp.