Monastery St John the Baptist - ruins Манастир Св Иван Предтеча руини
The Sozopol Monastery of St John the Forerunner (known in Bulgarian as "Sveti Yoan Prodrom" or "Predtecha i Krastitel") is a medieval monastic complex located on the southern shore of St Ivan Island — the largest Bulgarian island on the Black Sea — situated 910 metres from the northernmost point of the Stolets Peninsula (the Old Town of Sozopol), in Sozopol Municipality, Burgas Region. The island's highest point rises 33 metres above sea level, and on it stands a sonic lighthouse whose signals, together with the lighthouse at Cape Emine, guide vessels towards the Burgas Bay. The island is a natural and archaeological reserve under state protection, and the monastery occupies an area of about 0.5 hectares in the island's southern part, facing Sozopol. The site has a remarkable continuity of sacred use stretching back to antiquity. Archaeological evidence confirms the existence of a Thracian sanctuary on the same spot from the 7th century BC, followed by a Hellenistic-period temple — most probably dedicated to Apollo — from the 4th–3rd centuries BC. In the 4th century AD the first Christian basilica was constructed on the island, a three-nave structure of which the altar survives. This early church was destroyed at the end of the 5th or beginning of the 6th century, probably during barbarian invasions, but was soon rebuilt on a larger scale, and monastic life continued. In the 10th century the monastery developed into a major literary centre: highly educated monk-scribes copied liturgical books, hagiographies, and translations from Greek into Bulgarian, and the most precious work produced here — the novel Barlaam and Ioasaph — is dated to the 12th century and is today preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library. In 1263 the Byzantine military commander Mikhail Glava Tarchaneiotes rebuilt the monastery and constructed a new cathedral church dedicated to St John the Baptist, upon which the monastery was granted royal status. In 1308 the Bulgarian Tsar Todor Svetoslav married the Byzantine princess Theodora Palaiologina on the island, further confirming the monastery's prestige. Under the Palaiologoi it received the status of a royal and patriarchal (stavropegial) monastery. In 1363 Emperor John V Palaiologos issued a golden-seal charter confirming the monastery's landed properties. Destroyed in 1453, it was rebuilt between 1467 and 1471 by the monk Gervasy, and continued to function through the early Ottoman period. In 1623 Cossack pirates from the northern Black Sea coast raided and burned the monastery during their clashes with the Ottoman fleet, and the monastic community relocated to Halki Island near Constantinople, taking much of the library with them. The defining moment in the modern history of the monastery came on 28 July 2010, when a team led by Professor Kazimir Popkonstantinov of Veliko Tarnovo University discovered a marble reliquary in the ruins of the altar of the earliest basilica, containing bone relics of a saint. The inscription on the reliquary revealed that the relics had been brought to the island by a man named Thomas on 24 June — the feast day of the Nativity of St John the Baptist — establishing the identity of the saint as St John the Baptist. Radiocarbon dating by two independent laboratories placed the bones in the period from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD, consistent with the biblical chronology of the life of John the Baptist, and DNA analysis confirmed a genetic profile consistent with origin in the Middle East. The relics are now kept in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Sozopol, where they are displayed for veneration, while the alabaster casket that once housed them is exhibited in the Sozopol Archaeological Museum. The island is also home to the largest colony of yellow-legged Mediterranean gulls in Bulgaria and to the country's only population of the European rabbit introduced in 1934. Access to the island is strictly prohibited from April to 30 July during the nesting season, and at other times of year is made by boat from Sozopol harbour.
