Lamia

Lamia is a city of about fifty thousand people and it behaves like one: a grid of streets, a river, a market, four squares and a proper regional capital's worth of shops. It is not picturesque in the postcard sense. What it has is a castle on a rock above the town that has been occupied, with interruptions, since the Early Bronze Age.

That is the remarkable part. The acropolis of Lamia has fortification from 2700-2300 BC, and then in the late fifth century BC the Athenians built a polygonal-masonry citadel on the same ground: triangular in plan, about six hundred metres round, walls up to thirteen metres high and 1.35 m thick, with an Akropyrgio donjon inside. You climb it in the afternoon and the whole Spercheios plain and the Malian Gulf are laid out below.

The Archaeological Museum of Lamia is inside the castle, in restored nineteenth-century barracks, and runs from Neolithic to Roman.

Eighteen kilometres south-east is Thermopylae, and from Lamia it is a day trip rather than a pilgrimage — which is the best way to do it. The channel of the Spercheios where the battle was fought is still a stream between olive trees, with the wooded massif of Kallidromos closing the pass behind. The Leonidas statue is up at the memorial; the hot springs bubble at a constant 40°C by the roadside.

Three kilometres from the town, at Alamana, Athanasios Diakos died in 1821 on a wooden bridge with forty-eight men, and the site is marked.

Lamia has been a fortress since the third millennium BC, which is why the acropolis has such a long list of occupants. It was a major Mycenaean and Greek city, a Thessalian city of some weight, and the acropolis you can walk today is largely the late fifth-century BC Athenian fortification, built during the Peloponnesian War.

The Hellenistic and Roman town was a substantial settlement. Under the Ottomans Lamia was important as a garrison and market town and as the point controlling the Fourka Pass into Thessaly. It was the scene of a serious revolt in 1838, when the town was stormed and many of the rebels killed, and it took part in the 1862 revolution.

In the Second World War Lamia was the site of one of the more remarkable operations of the resistance: in November 1942 a detachment of ELAS, with British Special Operations Executive help, blew up the Gorgopotamos bridge eight kilometres away, cutting the main Axis supply road to Albania for months.

Lamia is today the capital of the Phthiotis regional unit and the seat of the whole region of Central Greece, and the largest town in the Phthiotis plain.

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: "Some say it is named from Lamos the son of Heracles, others from a woman Lamia who ruled the Trachinians". (Ethnica, s.v. Λάμια).

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.

Lamia sits in the Spercheios valley roughly twenty kilometres from the Malian Gulf, and its own port is Stylida, which is why the sea is close enough to matter without being the town's character. The castle terrace looks straight out over the gulf.

The obvious excursion is Thermopylae, eighteen kilometres south-east, and it should be done as a half-day rather than a stop. Then the Gorgopotamos bridge at about eight kilometres north, which is not the most beautiful object in Greece but carries one of the best resistance stories of the war.

Further out, Ypati at about twenty kilometres has thermal baths and the Byzantine Museum of Phthiotis, and seven kilometres beyond that the fifteenth-century monastery of Agathonos sits inside Oiti National Park, whose summit of Pyrgos reaches 2,152 m. West, Amfikleia and Kato Tithorea are the gateway to the Parnassus ski centre at Fterolakka, 1,800 m.

On the coast, Stylida is Lamia's port and Agia Marina is the other seaside settlement; Kamena Vourla, further round the gulf, is forty kilometres north and one of the best beaches on the mainland coast.

Lamia is a proper Central Greek city and eats like one: the regional cooking is meat, pies and the famous local pasta.

The things to look for are the kourambiedes, the local handmade egg pasta, which is the signature dish and appears in the shops and the tavernas constantly, and trachana, the cracked-wheat pasta baked in the oven. Both are genuinely local and both are worth seeking out rather than settling for the standard tourist food.

Around that it is the familiar mainland repertoire: grilled meats, the local cheeses, and wine from the hills. Lamia is a city with a large enough population to have restaurants worth eating at, and it is noticeably better for dinner than for lunch — which is another way of saying that this is a town that works in the evening.

April to June is the best time for Lamia: the plain is green, Thermopylae is pleasant, and the mountain passes are open. September and October are excellent, with the harvest in the plain and the vines on the hills. July and August are hot, and the castle is exposed, so go early or late. December to February is genuinely cold — it is a mainland town with snow on the surrounding mountains — but the Oiti and Parnassus ski centres are running. Spring is the best time for the gorge country.

Lamia is on the A1 motorway and on the main north–south railway between Athens and Thessaloniki, with frequent trains and buses. Taking the train rather than driving avoids the military road traffic south of the city.

It is the best base for Thermopylae and for the mountains of Oiti and Parnassus in the same trip. The castle is free and open and the light is best at either end of the day. Thermopylae is confusingly spread out — the actual battle site, the statue and the hot springs are all separated — so allow a couple of hours and drive rather than walk between them.