Macedonia & Thrace

Macedon was a kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, ruled from Aigai — today's Vergina — and then from Pella, until Philip II (359–336 BC) seized the gold of Mount Pangaion, took and renamed Philippi and made himself master of Greece. He was murdered in the theatre at Aigai, and his son Alexander, born at Pella and taught by Aristotle of Stagira, led the army as far as India. Rome broke the kingdom at Pydna in 168 BC, built the Via Egnatia across it and saw its own republic die at Philippi in 42 BC, where St Paul founded Europe's first Christian community around AD 50. Thessaloniki, founded in 315 BC and named after Alexander's half-sister, became an imperial seat under Galerius around AD 300 and then the second city of Byzantium; its sons Cyril and Methodius gave the Slavs an alphabet, and Mount Athos received its first great monastery in 963.

The Ottomans took Thrace and Macedonia in the late 14th century and Thessaloniki for good in 1430. After 1492 Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain made Salonica a largely Jewish, Ladino-speaking trading city for four centuries, while tobacco enriched Kavala and Xanthi in the 19th. Muhammad Ali, founder of modern Egypt, grew up in Kavala, and Atatürk in Thessaloniki in 1881.

The Greek army entered Thessaloniki in October 1912, on the feast of its patron St Demetrius; Western Thrace followed in 1920. A fire destroyed the centre of Thessaloniki in August 1917, and the population exchange of 1923 replaced most of the region's Muslims — those of Thrace were exempted — with hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace. In 1943 the Germans deported some 46,000 of Thessaloniki's Jews to Auschwitz, and few returned; the civil war ended on the mountains of Grammos and Vitsi in 1949. The Prespa Agreement of 2018 settled the dispute with North Macedonia over the name, and Thessaloniki's metro opened in November 2024.

Thessaloniki calls itself the symprotevousa, the co-capital, and cultivates a slower, more sociable style than Athens. It is a student city, with the country's largest university, and a festival city: the International Fair each September, where the prime minister sets out the year's economic policy, the Dimitria arts festival around the feast of St Demetrius on 26 October, and the international film festival. Football loyalties divide between PAOK, founded by Constantinople refugees in 1926, and Aris.

The refugees of 1923 shaped the whole north. Pontic Greeks from the Black Sea keep their dialect, the lyra and the martial serra dance, and gather at the new monastery of Panagia Soumela, founded in 1930 on Mount Vermio; refugees from Eastern Thrace brought the Anastenaria, the fire-walking rite performed at Langadas and Agia Eleni around 21 May. Older layers persist too: Vlach villages in the Pindus and on Vermio, and carnival customs such as the masked Genitsaroi and Boules of Naoussa, the bonfires of Kozani, Kastoria's Ragoutsaria and the big parade at Xanthi.

Thrace is home to Greece's only officially recognised minority: about 100,000 Muslims — Turkish-speakers, the Slavic-speaking Pomaks of the Rhodope villages, and Roma — who were exempted from the 1923 exchange and have their own mosques, muftis and bilingual schools in Xanthi and Komotini. Mount Athos, by contrast, is a wholly Orthodox world: twenty monasteries and around 2,000 monks under their own administration, with a rule, the avaton, that bars women.

About 2.6 million people live here, a quarter of the Greek population, and around a million of them in greater Thessaloniki, a dense city of apartment blocks curving round the Thermaic Gulf. The other towns are modest — Serres, Katerini, Kavala, Xanthi, Komotini and Alexandroupoli have between 50,000 and 70,000 people each — and West Macedonia, with about 255,000 inhabitants, is thinly populated.

Thessaloniki lives on its port, which serves the southern Balkans, its universities, trade and a growing technology sector. The plains are some of Greece's most productive farmland: peaches around Naoussa, tobacco around Xanthi, saffron at Kozani; marble is quarried on Thasos. Kozani and Ptolemaida, whose lignite long generated a large share of Greece's electricity, face the closure of the lignite plants, Kastoria still lives largely on its fur trade, and Alexandroupoli is an important port.

Halkidiki is Thessaloniki's playground — on summer Fridays the city empties down the motorway — and it is also the beach for drivers from Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and North Macedonia. Along the Evros heavy policing marks the EU's land border with Turkey. In the city the evening belongs to the long seafront promenade and to the café: the frappé was invented at the Thessaloniki fair in 1957.

Thessaloniki is known for its food. Breakfast is bougatsa, a filo pie filled with semolina custard or cheese, or a sesame koulouri; the kitchens of Smyrna and Constantinople gave the city its spiced soutzoukakia meatballs and its meze habit; the Thermaic Gulf supplies mussels; a night out ends with patsas, tripe soup; and the local sweet is the trigono of Panorama. The covered Modiano and open Kapani markets show off the produce.

West Macedonia cooks for cold winters: the sweet roasted red peppers of Florina, the giant beans of Prespa, the wild mushrooms of Grevena, and the saffron of Kozani. Around Lake Kerkini water buffalo are bred for meat; Serres makes akanes, a buttery relative of loukoumi; Halkidiki is known for large green olives and honey, Thasos for wrinkled black throumba olives, and Nea Karvali, near Kavala, settled by refugees from Cappadocia, for kourabiedes, almond shortbread. Thrace's sweet shops show their Ottoman inheritance in Komotini's soutzouk loukoum and Xanthi's syrup pastries and chocolate-walnut kariokes.

This is red-wine country. Xinomavro, a tannic, long-lived grape, makes the wines of Naoussa, one of the first Greek appellations, and of Amyndeo; Goumenissa and Epanomi complete the map, and the monks of Athos make wine too. Tsipouro is the everyday spirit, drunk with meze.

Thessaloniki's sights run uphill from the sea: the White Tower on the promenade, the Arch of Galerius and the Rotunda of about AD 300, the mosaics of Agios Dimitrios, Agia Sophia and Osios David — among fifteen early Christian and Byzantine monuments on the UNESCO list — the Archaeological, Byzantine and Jewish museums, and the walls and timber houses of Ano Poli, the Upper Town. An hour west, the royal tombs at Vergina are shown inside their burial mound — Philip II's gold larnax and wreath, the painted façades — near the restored palace of Aigai, the pebble mosaics of Pella and the waterfalls of Edessa. Mount Olympus (2,918 m), Greece's highest mountain and first national park, is climbed from Litochoro, above the sanctuary of Dion.

Halkidiki's three peninsulas reach into the Aegean: Kassandra, lined with resorts; Sithonia, with pine-backed coves such as Kavourotrypes and the natural harbour of Porto Koufo; and Athos. Mount Athos admits only men holding a permit, who walk between monasteries such as Great Lavra, Vatopedi and cliff-top Simonopetra beneath the 2,033-metre peak; everyone else sees them from the cruise boats out of Ouranoupoli. In West Macedonia, Kastoria wraps round a lake lined with Byzantine churches and fur merchants' mansions, and the Prespa lakes hold one of the world's largest colonies of Dalmatian pelicans.

Eastwards lie the buffalo and birdlife of Lake Kerkini, the Lion of Amphipolis, and Philippi, a UNESCO site with a theatre, forum and basilicas. Kavala climbs from its harbour to a Byzantine castle, past a 16th-century aqueduct and the Imaret of Muhammad Ali; Thasos, a short ferry crossing from Keramoti, has beaches and ancient marble quarries at Aliki. Beyond the Nestos gorge, Xanthi's old town of tobacco mansions stands below the Pomak villages of the Rhodope; then come the lagoon monastery of Porto Lagos, the Dadia forest and the Evros delta, the silk town of Soufli and, by ferry from Alexandroupoli, Samothrace and its Sanctuary of the Great Gods.