The Black Sea islands are not about escape so much as return: to silence, to simplicity, to a slower rhythm of seeing.
The Black Sea islands don’t seduce; they linger. They move in undertones — gunmetal light, pewter horizons, and the scent of iron and salt. For millennia, this has been a crossroads rather than a coastline: where Greek traders once bartered for grain, Byzantine monks built sanctuaries, and empires drew their trembling borders. Yet in a sea so storied, its islands remain little known, even to those who live along its shores.
Unlike the Mediterranean, the Black Sea keeps its secrets close. It holds only a handful of small islands, most uninhabited, most unseen. The best known are Zmiyinyy (Snake Island) and Berezan, both belonging to Ukraine. Even larger, though of a different kind, is Dzharylhach — officially referred to as an island, yet geologically a barrier island formed from a vast sandbank in Karkinit Bay.
With the exception of Georgia, every nation bordering the Black Sea — Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine — has at least one. All lie on the continental shelf, close to shore, scattered like punctuation marks at the continent’s edge. There are no high-sea islands here, no faraway paradises adrift in blue. Just quiet rocks that have survived history’s tempests.
For travelers, that scarcity is part of the spell.
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The Forgotten Edge of Europe
The Black Sea’s western coast, where Bulgaria and Romania face each other across the Danube Delta, feels suspended between centuries. Fishing boats rest in the shallows beside modern marinas, and in Sozopol, cobblestone streets still smell faintly of woodsmoke and salt. Offshore, the outlines of Black Sea islands darken the horizon like half-remembered dreams.
The first, St. Anastasia, rises from the Bay of Burgas: a volcanic outcrop softened by monastery walls and the call of gulls. The second, St. Thomas, crouches further south, a bristling wilderness of cactus and legend. They are tiny, improbable, and wholly unlike the manicured islands of the Aegean.
Here, travel feels like rediscovery.
St. Anastasia Island: The Sound of Solitude
A half-hour boat ride from Burgas, St. Anastasia Island (once known as Bolshevik Island) appears abruptly, a dark comma in the pale water. From a distance, its red-roofed buildings seem to float. Up close, the volcanic rock is flecked with lichen, the air scented with sea fennel and thyme.
For centuries, monks lived here in near silence, their chapel perched on the island’s highest point. Later, during Bulgaria’s turbulent 20th century, the monastery was converted into a prison. In the 1920s, a group of political prisoners escaped, briefly declaring the island a “Republic of Freedom” before being captured again. The story lingers; part folklore, part defiance.
Today, the monastery has been restored, its cells turned into a small museum. There’s a café shaded by fig trees, and a tiny inn where the waves serve as a lullaby. By dusk, when the last ferry leaves for Burgas, St. Anastasia Island belongs only to its shadows and its wind.
Visitors often describe it as “haunting,” but that word misses the point. It isn’t haunted; it’s alive in a quieter register. The kind of place where you feel the centuries breathing beside you, unhurried and unbothered.
St. Thomas Island: The Island with Thorns
Fifteen kilometres south of St. Anastasia Island, off the coast of Arkutino, lies St. Thomas Island, locally known as Zmiyata — “The Snake” — for the reptiles that once populated it. Don’t let the name deter you; today the island belongs to cacti and seabirds.
The island’s surface bristles with prickly pear cactus, brought here in the 1930s by a Bulgarian botanist who wanted to see if subtropical plants could survive the Black Sea’s moods. They did, and every summer, their yellow blooms spill across the dark volcanic rock like sunlight frozen in place.
At just 0.012 square kilometers, St. Thomas is small enough to walk end-to-end in minutes, yet large enough to hold centuries. Archaeologists have unearthed traces of Thracian altars, Byzantine chapels, and Ottoman watch posts. Today, it is uninhabited, protected as part of the Ropotamo Nature Reserve.
To reach it, you hire a fisherman from the nearby village of Duni. There are no piers, no cafés, no paths, just the hum of the boat engine, the slap of water against hull, and the feeling that you’re traveling backward through time.
From the sea, the island glows amber under the afternoon sun, a living postcard of solitude. For travelers seeking hidden Black Sea islands or eco islands in Bulgaria, St. Thomas is not a detour; it’s a revelation.
Sacalin Island: The Island That’s Still Becoming
Northward, where the Danube empties into the Black Sea in a labyrinth of reeds and lagoons, lies Romania’s Sacalin Island. It didn’t always exist, at least not as one solid form. The river’s shifting currents carried sand and silt to the sea, and over time, land began to take shape. Even now, Sacalin is mutable, part island, part mirage, its boundaries redrawn by every tide.
The Romanian government has declared it a biosphere reserve, off-limits to human settlement. It’s home to pelicans, egrets, spoonbills, and wild horses that wander through salt marshes. The sky here feels endless; the air hums with wings.
To visit, travelers can charter a small boat from the village of Sfântu Gheorghe or Murighiol, gliding through the reed channels that lace the Danube Delta. There’s no landing allowed, but you can circle the island — a drifting meditation between water and light.
This isn’t an island to arrive at; it’s one to contemplate from afar. It represents the Black Sea’s defining paradox: constantly changing, yet timeless in its rhythms. In photographs, Sacalin looks dreamlike, almost too still to be real. In person, it’s an essay in impermanence.
For anyone visiting Sacalin Island in Romania, it offers the rare privilege of witnessing a landscape in the act of creation.
Zmiyinyy (Snake Island) and Berezan: The Northern Sentinels
At the sea’s northern rim, beyond the silty lacework of the delta, rise two small but storied islands: Zmiyinyy (Snake Island) at the mouth of the Danube, and Berezan by the Dnieper–Bug estuary.
Both belong to Ukraine, and both hold more history than their modest sizes suggest. Berezan was once a Greek trading post in the 7th century BCE — a frontier between the known and the unknown world. Its eroded cliffs still reveal shards of amphorae and pottery, the ghosts of ancient commerce.
Nearly 240 kilometres to the southwest, Snake Island stands like a lone sentinel in open waters near the maritime border with Romania. To the ancients, it was sacred to Achilles. To the empires, it was a military outpost. Today, it remains both symbol and stronghold: a speck of land that has shaped centuries of navigation and conflict.
You can’t visit easily. And that’s fitting. Some places are meant to be imagined rather than touched. When the evening light falls across the northern Black Sea, both islands glow like coins left in the tide.
Islands of Story and Stillness
Taken together, these islands form not an archipelago but a mood of endurance, of mystery, of distance held dear. The Black Sea islands are bound by absence: no crowds, no resorts, no high-sea wilderness. Yet each carries its own mythology, layered like sediment.
In Bulgaria, St. Ivan Island near Sozopol shelters the ruins of a 13th-century monastery, where archaeologists unearthed relics said to belong to John the Baptist. In Turkey, Giresun Island still hosts pagan spring rituals where women weave garlands for luck. Along the Russian coast, small uninhabited rocks stand like punctuation in fog.
The Black Sea’s islands have always been more spiritual than geographic. They are places to pause rather than to possess. To visit them is to experience a form of travel stripped of spectacle, where you measure beauty not by what you do, but by how deeply you listen.
How to Go
Best Season
May through September, when the water warms and ferries run regularly. Spring brings soft light and clear air; September gives golden evenings and fewer crowds.
Getting There
- St. Anastasia Island: Daily boats depart from Burgas Pier (mid-May to October).
- St. Thomas Island: No scheduled ferries; hire a local fisherman from Duni or Sozopol.
- Sacalin Island: Access by boat only, with licensed guides from the Danube Delta (no landings permitted).
- Snake and Berezan Islands: Access restricted; inquire with Ukrainian maritime authorities or academic institutions.
Where to Stay
- In Burgas, the Art Deco Hotel Primoretz offers sea views and quiet glamour.
- In Sozopol, old-town guesthouses like Casa del Mare spill down the cliffs with balconies over the water.
- In the Danube Delta, eco-lodges such as Lebăda Resort and Green Village let you wake to birdcall and mist.
What to Bring
Curiosity, light linen, binoculars for birdwatching, a notebook. The Black Sea rewards those who travel slowly and look closely.
The Quiet Luxury of the Black Sea
Luxury here has nothing to do with excess. It’s the feel of salt on skin, the rhythm of a ferry engine, the sight of cormorants slicing through pewter light. It’s the rare privilege of places that haven’t yet been edited for visitors.
The Black Sea’s islands are small, steadfast, mostly forgotten yet monumental in presence. They remind us that beauty exists not in abundance, but in the space to notice.
When the Mediterranean dazzles, the Black Sea hums a lower, older frequency. One you feel not in the eyes but in the bones.