The Lighthouse of Pomorie

The Lighthouse of Pomorie (officially the Pomorie Navigation Light) is a maritime lighthouse located on an artificial platform of stone blocks southeast of Cape Pomorie, in Pomorie Municipality, Burgas Region — the only lighthouse on the entire Bulgarian Black Sea coast that stands fully exposed in open water, far from the shore. The lighthouse tower rises to 8 metres above sea level and is built of stone on its two-level platform. It was constructed in 1933 by the German firm Julius Pintsch — the same company that built many of the navigational lights along the Bulgarian coast — and signals the reef and surrounding shallows southeast of the Pomorie Peninsula. Its gas optics were replaced with electric in the 1960s, and today the structure is fully automated, activated by a photosensor and powered by rechargeable batteries. The history of navigation lights at Pomorie stretches back to extraordinary depths of antiquity. The Czech historian Konstantin Jireček, in his 1884 travelogue "Travels in Bulgaria," records a local tradition that Pomorie was relocated to its current position on the peninsula during the Byzantine period by Empress Irene (8th century) at the site of an ancient lighthouse (phar) that belonged to an older harbour settlement — a tradition whose archaeological traces have not yet been found but which places the memory of a navigational light at this spot more than a millennium before the current structure. A further lighthouse at Pomorie mentioned by Jireček in 1884 also remains archaeologically undocumented. Historical records note that a light on an iron post was installed at the head of the Pomorie harbour pier in 1955, and in the southern part of the Old Town peninsula a small white stone tower 4.8 metres high with a German automatic optic fuelled by petroleum gas was erected in 1932 — of the four lighthouses at Pomorie mentioned in historical records, only two survive today. The current lighthouse, standing isolated on its platform with the sea on all sides, has become one of the most photographed nautical landmarks on the Bulgarian coast and a symbol of the Pomorie Bay that, with its blinking light and the setting sun, creates one of the most distinctive coastal silhouettes in Bulgaria.