Kilkis

Kilkis is not a pretty town and does not pretend to be. It is a working city in the middle of the plain, an hour from Thessaloniki, and its heart is industry: the Austro-Greek tobacco warehouses line the streets, and the largest non-ferrous metal business in Greece is based here. But climb the low hill of St George in the middle of it and the place changes character. On top is a post-Byzantine church, built around 1830 and wall-painted inside, which gives the town its name in a sense — Greek is Κιλκίς, and the hill is Αγιος Γεώργιος. At the foot of that same hill is the cave, and the cave is the surprise. It is a thousand square metres over two levels, and the upper one is walled and roofed with formations that look exactly like coral — calcite concretions grown into branching shapes that have no business being underground. It is genuinely unusual, it is cool and damp even in August, and almost nobody is there. The town also keeps a war museum on the pine-covered hill of the Heroes, which is a sobering counterweight: this was the first town the Bulgars took in the Second Balkan War, and the fighting here in June 1913 decided the whole campaign.

Kilkis has been called several things, which is the first clue to its position on a frontier. The Romans knew it as Callicum, and the name may come from kallikos, the leather sieve used to catch gold in the river below — the Gallikos, the ancient Ehedoros, which really did carry gold. In the region the Macedonians found a rich country: when Philip II passed through, the people of Krestonia are said to have offered him olives he had never tasted before. The Romans took the area in 148 BC, and the Middle Ages passed it between Byzantium and Bulgaria with the usual interruptions, including a sack in the tenth century that sent part of the population to southern Italy. Under the Ottomans, Kulkush was for a long time no more than a village, and then began to prosper in textiles. The city’s history is dominated by 1913. It went to Bulgaria in the First Balkan War, and in the Second the Greek army took it in the Battle of Kilkis-Lahanas between 19 and 21 June, at a cost of over eight thousand Greek casualties. Greece named a battleship after the town for it. Almost the whole Bulgarian population was then expelled and the city burnt, and it was rebuilt by about thirty thousand Greek refugees, most of them from Strumica — so thoroughly that Kilkis was for a time called Nea Stromnitsa. They built the church of the Fifteen Martyrs out of memory of where they had come from. The town grew again after the war, and its industry, particularly metal, has defined it since.

Kilkis sits in the middle of the Axios valley with no coast in sight; the nearest sea is on the Thermaic Gulf about forty kilometres east, and that is an industrial shore rather than a holiday one, so it is not where anyone comes to swim. What the region has instead is water everywhere and a landscape that changes every few kilometres. The Axios and the Gallikos cross the flat farmland, and two shallow lakes lie north of the town: Pikrolimni, which dries and refills with the seasons, and Doirani, a real wetland on the route the British and Greek armies fought over in 1917 and 1918, now kept in its war cemetery. In the mountains further north, the waterfalls of Skra on the Kroussia are at their best in spring, and the road up passes villages like Goumenissa, whose nineteenth-century church of St George is one of the finest in Central Macedonia. The valley is the region’s real character: rice, beans and peppers, and flat light to the horizon.

Kilkis sits on the Axios, one of the great rice-growing valleys of Europe, so the food starts with agriculture rather than with a taverna tradition. The rice is genuinely good and appears in everything; the plain also produces the beans, peppers, oil and fruit that fill the Saturday market in the town centre. Macedonian grill cooking is the default — meats over charcoal, thick vegetable dishes, filo pies — and the neighbouring villages towards Paiko and the Vardar are where the rural cooking is at its most traditional. The industrial town is worth seeking out for its bakeries and its coffee rather than anything exotic. Do not leave without trying the local pies, and finish as the region does, with a tsipouro.

Spring (April to May) is the best time for Kilkis: the Axios plain is green, the Axios itself is in spate, and the waterfalls at Skra are at their strongest. Autumn (September to October) is also good, with the harvest in and the light flatter and kinder on the plain. Summer (July to August) is peak season and very hot, but the cave stays cool and is at its best precisely then. Winter is cold, though it is also when the plain is at its emptiest and the museum and the war history have you to yourself.

Kilkis is a station on the railway between Thessaloniki and Serres, worked by regional services from Thessaloniki's central station. The nearest major airport is Thessaloniki International Airport "Makedonia", from which the town lies west along the A2 Egnatia Odos. Without a car, a KTEL bus from Thessaloniki is the practical alternative to the limited rail service.

The cave is the reason to come, and it is best in the afternoon heat — more than a thousand square metres of cool damp at a constant temperature, which is why it has a local reputation for anyone with breathing trouble. Wear something you do not mind marking and shoes with grip. Go to the Archaeological Museum for the Kouros, which is the single most important object in the regional unit. Kilkis is close enough to Thessaloniki to combine, and further east Evropos is worth the trip if you have a car. Eat in the villages rather than on the industrial roads — that is where the cooking is.