The polis of Apollonia Pontica, the predecessor of Sozopol, was established in 611 B.C. in the southern part of the Burgas bay on the Black Sea as a part of the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean basin, scientifically called “The Great Greek Colonization”. This is why it is imperative that we first present the details on this process, which are useful to every non-professional reader in the field of history.
The Greek ethnos was differentiated in the middle of the II millennium B.C., meaning that every individual in the community had the self-awareness that he belonged to a separate ethnical group called Hellene. Lands, which were inhabited mainly with the Hellenic ethnos, were the lands of the Greeks – Hellas. There wasn’t a unified state or at least a state that included most of the Hellenic lands in this period and even later, with the exception of the short-lived empire of Philip and Alexander of Macedonia. The Hellenes were divided into hundreds of small Greek state formations in the lands of Hellas, spreading around the VIII c. B.C. on the territory of present-day Greece, the Asia Minor coastline and the islands in the Aegean. These state formations with an area between several square kilometers and several thousand square kilometers had around the VIII c. B.C. different forms of government ranging from democracy to monarchy.
