Katerini

Katerini is not a spectacular city and does not need to be. What it has is a position: stand anywhere in the centre and look south and there is Olympus, close enough and high enough to fill the sky, with the Enipeas gorge cutting into it above Litochoro. That single view has shaped the town, because for two thousand years the people of the plain below Olympus have had a mountain to look at and a set of gods to attribute it to.

The city itself works as a base rather than a destination. It has a genuine nineteenth-century centre of neoclassical houses around the Liberty Square and its pedestrian street, a municipal park with a small lake, and a cathedral, and the coffee culture is correspondingly good. The old quarters fill with people in the evening.

What makes Katerini worth a stop rather than a night is the concentration around it. Dion, the sacred city of the Macedonian kings, is seventeen kilometres south. Pydna, the last Macedonian capital, is sixteen kilometres the other way. Leivithra, the sanctuary of the Great Gods, is twenty-seven kilometres away in the foothills. The castle of Platamonas sits on the coast road, and the Paralia district, the old port seven kilometres out, is where the seafood is. You could spend a week in the region without spending a whole day in Katerini itself, and most people do.

The name is old and uncertain. Travellers and maps record a settlement called Hatera from the thirteenth century, and the current name is generally held to derive either from that or from a small chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine just east of the town, which was still giving the place the official name Agia Aikaterini in the early twentieth century. What is certain is that Katerini itself is a modern foundation — there is no securely identified ancient city on this spot, and the ancient Pierian centres lie elsewhere along the plain and the coast.

The area around it is one of the oldest settled parts of Greece. Pieria, the coastal strip, was the homeland of the Pierians, and Thucydides records that the Macedonians took the region by driving the Pierians out of it in the first half of the fifth century BC; the Pierians moved to the far side of the Strymon, and the country between Mount Pangaion and the sea kept the name Pierian Gulf long afterwards. Dion, seventeen kilometres south, was the religious centre of the Macedonian kingdom, where the Olympic games were held in honour of Zeus Olympios and where the Macedonian kings were buried.

Katerini was liberated on 16 October 1912 by the Greek 7th Infantry Division during the First Balkan War. The population nearly doubled after the 1923 exchange of populations, when Muslim residents left and refugees from Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor arrived, which explains the strong evangelical community in the Evaggelika district and the concentration of Greek refugees in the town today. The municipal park and the civic centre are largely products of the twentieth century.

Katerini is seven kilometres from the sea, and the coast of Pieria is the reason most people come in summer. Paralia, the old port, is the town beach and the easiest from the centre, running along the flat sand below the town with the usual waterfront tavernas. Korinos, west along the coast road, is the largest and most developed of the Pierian resorts, a long organised beach with a proper resort strip behind it. Olympiaki Akti, at the foot of Olympus and closer to Litochoro, is where the older, quieter crowd goes. Peristasi and Kallithea sit further along the same coast road.

The water is shallow and flat, the beach is fine sand, and the sea here is usually calm in a way the Aegean proper is not. Behind the beaches the road climbs immediately into the Pierian foothills, so you can spend the morning on the sand and the afternoon in Litochoro, which is the classic combination.

Pieria is an agricultural region and the food follows the fields: cherries and strawberries in season, kiwi, olives and olive oil, and the vegetables from the plain. The vineyards of Pieria are genuinely good and produce both still wine and sparkling. The seafood, though, comes from Paralia and the coast, and that is where to eat it — the town itself is inland food, and good, but it is not fish. The local cheeses and the pies are the everyday staples. Local mountain herbs, sold as "tea of Olympus" in the villages at the foot of the mountain, are worth trying.

May and June are the best months for Katerini: the plain is green, the beaches have not yet filled, and the temperature is comfortable. September is excellent, warm enough to swim without the crowds. July and August are hot and the coast is at its busiest. The mountains change the picture — Elatochori, the ski centre in the Pierian range, is a winter destination about 33 km from the town, so the region works in two seasons rather than one. Spring is also the best time for the ancient sites, when Dion and Pydna are not baking.

Katerini has a railway station on the Athens–Thessaloniki line, with suburban services, and sits on the A1 motorway 68 km from Thessaloniki, which has the nearest airport. Buses run from the town to Thessaloniki, Larissa, Edessa and the coast.

Rent a car if you want to reach Dion, Pydna and Litochoro in one day, because the sites are spread over 40 km. Note that Litochoro is the town to stay in if the mountain is what you came for, and that the archaeological sites close in the deep of winter.