Grevena

Grevena is a small town — about 12,500 people — and its whole identity is organised around two things: mushrooms and mountains. It calls itself the city of mushrooms, and it is not a joke. The Pindus above the town produces an enormous variety of wild mushrooms, the town has mushroom statues on its streets, and from October the market and the restaurants fill with them in a season that is genuinely worth planning a trip around.

The mountains are the other half. The Valia Calda — the warm valley — is one of the oldest protected national parks in Greece and one of the wettest places in the country, with brown bears in the Vitsi and the Smolikas range beyond. It is cold and wet for eight months of the year, which is not a complaint: it is why the mushrooms and the water are what they are.

And there is a third thing, which almost nobody knows about. At Milia, a village fifteen kilometres north of the town, excavators found the tusks of a straight-tusked elephant. The longest pair, over five metres, was found there in 2006 and entered in the Guinness Book of Records in 2009. The animal lived here about three million years ago. Grevena has the distinction of being, in effect, a Pleistocene site with a market town on top of it.

There is no classical foundation myth for Grevena and no ancient city of any consequence in the immediate area — the name appears in Byzantine records from around the tenth century, but the site was uninhabited or lightly settled before then. What made the town was geography: it sits on the Grevenitis where the route from Macedonia into north-west Thessaly and Epirus crosses the upper Aliakmon, and it became a trading and transport junction for the mountain villages around it, with stockbreeders and muleteers moving goods down from the Pindus.

Under Ottoman rule Grevena was a small military and administrative centre, the seat of a kaza in the sanjak of Serres within the vilayet of Monastir. It had its own armatoliki — a privileged armed settlement — recorded as early as 1537, based around the figure of the armatolos Vergos. The area converted to Islam substantially in the late eighteenth century, and it was touched by the revolutionary movement in 1821 but was in no state to rise; its later role came through the Ziakas family, with Yiannoulis and Theodoros Ziakas prominent in the fighting of 1854 and again in the revolution of 1878.

The town changed hands completely after 1913, and the population exchange of 1923 removed its Muslim community and replaced it with refugees from Asia Minor and Pontus. Almost all the Ottoman buildings — the mosque, the madrasa, the barracks, the konak of Veli Bey — were destroyed in the twentieth century, which is why the old town looks as it does. Grevena was liberated on 13 October 1912. Its regional unit was only created in 1964, having until then been attached to Kozani.

Grevena sits on the Grevenitis river at the eastern foot of the Pindus, and the whole point of the town is that the mountains are twenty minutes away. Valia Calda is the headline, and it deserves the drive: the valley is named "the warm valley" precisely because it is one of the coldest, wettest places in Greece, with snow lying for seven or eight months and a bear population in the upper forest.

The second thing to drive is the bridges. The old mule routes of the upper Aliakmon are marked by stone bridges, of which the Aziz Aga is the finest and the highest in the region. They are scattered through the gorge country around the town rather than concentrated at one site, and several are only reachable on foot.

The villages are the third reason. Perivoli and Avdella are Vlach settlements at over a thousand metres, with the distinctive kalyva architecture — houses built as self-supporting blocks of stone — and a Vlach language and culture that survived here in a way it did not in most of the north. If you are in the region in August, the village feasts are the thing to plan around.

Grevena is a mountain town and the cooking is Pindus cooking: grilled meats, pies, the local cheese, and whatever the forests produce. But the mushroom season is the event. From October the town sells dozens of varieties — boletes, chanterelles, porcini — prepared simply, grilled or in soups, and the mushroom dishes in the tavernas here are as good as anywhere in Greece.

The cheese is Anevato, which has carried a protected designation since 1996 and is unusual in being permitted to be made entirely from goat's milk. Local honey is plentiful. Ask for the local wine from the vineyards around the town, and finish with tsipouro.

October is the month to come: the mushroom season, the autumn colours in the Pindus, and stable weather. September is good for the mountains before the crowds. June to September is the walking season, and July and August are for the village feasts. Winter is serious in Valia Calda — deep snow for months — which is fine for cross-country and bad for driving unless you have chains. Spring is green and quiet.

Grevena has no railway station, so the practical route in is by car: the town lies about 87 km from Trikala, 100 km from Ioannina and 170 km from Thessaloniki. Buses run from Trikala and Thessaloniki, but they are infrequent.

The mountain roads to Valia Calda and to the bridges need a car, and in autumn and winter you should have chains. Book accommodation early for October and for August village feasts. The Rodia fossil site is on the edge of town and worth a stop.