Edessa

You hear Edessa before you see it. The Edessaios is the loudest river in this part of Greece and the town is built along both banks of it, with water running through channels under the bridges and past the kerbs, so that the sound follows you down the main street. Then you climb twenty minutes through a park of plane trees and the ground drops away, and there it is: the Karanos, seventy metres of water falling into a green gorge.

The park is enormous — around a hundred thousand square metres — and it is the reason people come. At night the falls are lit and the whole gorge glows, which is a genuinely strange sight in a town this inland. In daylight you can walk down behind the curtain of water along the paved path that runs behind the fall, where spray and noise make it feel like a cave. There are twelve falls in total across the park; the big one is only the most spectacular.

The other Edessa is the town itself, which is older than the waterfall. The ancient city sat directly below where the modern centre is, and its six-metre defensive wall still stands in the middle of town with the rock of the acropolis behind it. Edessa was on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that ran from the Adriatic to Byzantium, and a Byzantine stone bridge of the eleventh century, the Kiupri bridge, still carries the old road across the river below the falls.

Edessa has been a crossing on the Vardar route for two and a half thousand years, which is why it kept mattering after the water did not. The ancient city, founded in the Archaic period and rebuilt several times, controlled the northern exit from the plain of Thessaly into the Balkans. Its acropolis rock rises directly over the modern town and its walls are still visible in ordinary streets, along with an ancient theatre cut into the slope. Edessa struck its own coins continuously for a very long time — the finds run from the late third century BC well into the third century AD — which tells you how thoroughly it sat outside anyone else's currency.

That location put it on the Roman Via Egnatia, and the town kept its importance through the Byzantine period, when the Kiupri bridge was raised across the Edessaios. There is no securely documented foundation date for the town, and the usual claims for it being the Edessa of the Macedonian kings rest on later Byzantine writing rather than on evidence from the period.

The modern town was liberated from Ottoman rule on 18 October 1912, after the Battle of Sarantaporo. The falls themselves are geologically recent: the watercourse that makes them dates from after a fourteenth-century earthquake, which is why the ancient city and the famous waterfall are not, in the end, the same age at all.

The name is recorded by Stephanus of Byzantium in the sixth century AD. His Ethnica is not a book of stories but a dictionary of Greek place-names, and for this one it says: "It was so called from the force of its waters". (Ethnica, s.v. Ἔδεσσα).

That is the whole of what an ancient source has to say about how the place got its name. It is a shorter answer than the guidebooks give, and it is the only one with a source behind it.

Edessa is a genuinely inland town — the nearest sea is roughly fifty kilometres away across the plain to the east — so this is not a place to come for a swim. What there is instead is water everywhere and a landscape that changes sharply as you climb out of the town.

The gorge itself runs north-south, and the paths above it — the old Via Egnatia road, the routes to Stagira and to the Edessaios springs — climb quickly into forest. Lake Doirani and the wetlands of the Axios valley are to the west. The Vardar, the river that gave the whole region its Ottoman name, runs through the flat agricultural country below the town, and the plain around it is where the produce in the local markets comes from.

The most important day trip is not a landscape at all: Aigai, twelve kilometres away, is the ancient Macedonian capital with the intact royal tombs of Philip II and Alexander IV. Edessa sits close enough to it to be combined in a day, and in practice most visitors do exactly that.

Edessa cooks like the rest of central Macedonia: grilled meats, pies, and whatever is good in the fields around the plain below the town. The region produces genuinely good fruit, and the local pies are the thing to order. Waterfalls attract a lot of visitors and the town has the usual tourist-facing tavernas near the park, but the food improves as you get away from the falls and back towards the centre. Finish with a tsipouro, as everywhere in this part of Greece.

Late spring to early summer, from May into June, is the best time for Edessa: the falls are running at full volume from the spring snowmelt, the gorge is green, and the days are hot but not yet brutal. September and October are also excellent and much quieter, with the water still up. July and August are hot and busy at the falls after dark, when the lighting draws a crowd, but the gorge itself is pleasant in the morning. Winter is mild in the town and wet, and the falls run hard from the autumn rains.

Edessa has a train station on the Thessaloniki–Florina line, and buses run from Thessaloniki and Larissa. By road it is the easiest way in, and the same car carries on to Aigai, twelve kilometres away.

Come in the afternoon for the falls, stay for the evening lighting, and go early the next morning when the park is empty and the mist is still in the gorge. The path behind the main fall gets wet — wear something you do not mind ruining. The ancient site below the town centre is easy to miss because it is in the middle of ordinary streets.