St. Cyril and Methodius Church – Sozopol

The Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, also known as the “Refugee Church”, was built in 1889 by master builder Usta Gencho from Tryavna to serve the needs of Bulgarian refugees from Adrianople (Edirne) and Eastern Thrace who settled in Sozopol. At the time, all three of the town’s churches were under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, leaving the Bulgarian community without a place of worship. Initially, the church stood outside the town’s boundaries, and services were held only on major feast days.

After 1944, the church was repurposed—first as a town museum, then as a storage facility, and finally as a “museum corner of underwater archaeology”. Following the fall of communism in 1989, the state returned the church to the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

The church is a single-nave basilica, measuring 25 meters long, 12.7 meters wide, and 12 meters high. A new bell tower (22.8 meters tall) stands nearby. Inside, the church houses a valuable carved iconostasis made of oak and boxwood, crafted by 17th–18th century Debar masters. This iconostasis was salvaged from the destroyed 19th-century Sozopol church of “St. John the Theologian”.

After extensive renovations, the church reopened for regular services in 2011.

The church is named after Saints Cyril and Methodius—also known as the “Apostles to the Slavs”—who created and spread the Glagolitic alphabet, the precursor to the Cyrillic script.