Kozani

Kozani sits on a plateau at around seven hundred metres, hemmed in by the Vermio, the Vourinos and the Pierian mountains, and the effect is of a city built in a bowl. It is not pretty in the postcard sense and does not pretend to be, but it has a real character: the town grew out of a merchant and banking town in the Ottoman period, and the mansions and the trading houses it built then are still standing in the back streets.

The two things that pull people here are an hour apart. The first is Aiani, twenty-two kilometres south, the ancient Macedonian city on a low hill above the Aliakmon with a royal necropolis, an early Byzantine basilica and a museum that holds one of the finest groups of late sixth and early fifth century BC gold and silverwork in Greece. The second is the landscape north of the town, where the plateau opens out into the lignite basin — the Kozani–Ptolemaida–Amyntaio field, the largest coal deposit in Greece, which has driven the region economically for fifty years and reshaped the land above it.

In between is the town itself: the Archaeological Museum with its famous case of ancient glass, the church of St Nicholas from 1664, and the old square with the Mamatsios clock tower, which is the landmark you orient yourself by.

The ancient kingdom here was Elimeia, one of the small Upper Macedonian states that held out longest against the Argead Macedonians. Its capital was Aiani, and the royal necropolis at Aiani has produced burials of a quality that places it alongside Vergina. Philip II absorbed Elimeia in the fourth century BC and the region became part of the Roman province of Macedonia in 148 BC, after the king's defeat at Pydna in 168.

The modern town is late. Kozani appears in the Ottoman tax registers of 1528 and 1530 as a small settlement, and took its present name during the Ottoman period. It grew steadily through the eighteenth century as a centre of the fur trade and of commerce along the Vlach mountain routes, and its merchants established houses in Vienna, Pest, Transylvania, Germany, Belgrade, Bucharest and Constantinople. That diaspora is the reason a provincial plateau town has so many nineteenth-century mansions.

The single most consequential modern fact about Kozani is coal. The lignite of the Kozani–Ptolemaida–Amyntaio basin has been mined on a large scale since the 1970s, powering Greece, but it has also removed villages, altered the water table and stripped vegetation from the plateau above the pits. Kozani is now the administrative capital of a region whose economy is largely extractive and whose landscape is visibly marked by it. The town was liberated on 11 October 1912, during the First Balkan War.

Kozani is a plateau city at 700 metres with no sea within 150 kilometres, and the region is defined by altitude rather than by coast. The plain to the north drops into the lignite basin, where the mining has created a strange artificial landscape of spoil heaps, settling ponds and bare reclaimed ground, and where Lake Polyfytos sits at the bottom of it.

Up and to the west the country changes completely. The Pindus foothills begin within thirty kilometres, and the villages there — Vlasti, Nymphaio, Arkochori, Emporio — are Vlach settlements with stone houses, slate roofs and a different vernacular entirely from the plateau towns. The Aspropotamos and the Aliakmon run through this country.

South is the archaeological country: Aiani, twenty-two kilometres away, is the main one, and there are Byzantine churches and monasteries scattered across the foothills. The nearest serious swimming is not in the region at all, which is worth remembering before booking Kozani as a summer base.

Kozani is a mountain plateau, so the cooking is meat, cheese and strong stuff rather than seafood. Try the local sausages and the pies, and the cheeses of Western Macedonia, which are among the best in Greece. The genuinely famous product is saffron, which the town around Kozani cultivates under protected designation and which turns up in sweets and in the winter sauces of the region. Wild mushrooms come down from the Pindos in the autumn and are a real seasonal event. Finish with tsipouro, which is distilled in this part of Greece as a matter of course.

September and October are the best months for Kozani: the saffron is harvested in October, the weather is still warm, and the mountains are clear. May and June are good for walking and for the mountain villages before the heat. July and August are hot on the exposed plateau but pleasant in the foothills. The town empties considerably in midwinter, when it can snow, and the ski centre at Voio is a short drive away.

Kozani has its own airport, Filippos, with scheduled domestic service. It also sits on the A2 motorway about two hours from Thessaloniki, with trains on the Thessaloniki–Florina line and buses, though both need reserving ahead as the service is infrequent.

A car is close to essential for Aiani and the mountain villages. The Archaeological Museum is the one not to miss, and go early: it closes early in the afternoon. The Servia bridge is best photographed in the evening light when the water is high.