Polygyros

The road into Polygyros climbs, and that is the first thing you notice: the houses stack upward on the slope in a shallow bowl, red roofs against the dark green of Cholomontas, the Aegean somewhere behind you and below. It is not a town built to be looked at from a distance. It is a working administrative centre with about 7,800 people in it, and it is still the first place most people stop when they drive onto the Chalkidiki peninsula, because from here the three fingers of Kassandra, Sithonia and Athos are all within an easy drive.

What brings people back, though, is February. The Polygyros carnival is the loudest thing in northern Greece: satires on local politics, a parade that runs for three nights and does not really stop, and an Argentaria bonfire on the last night that burns the Carnival King. Come in February and the town has a different rhythm entirely from the quiet of August, when the square empties out and everyone has gone to the water.

In between the two seasons there is a third Polygyros that most visitors never see: the two museums. The Folklore Museum fills the old house of a former mayor with loom weights, tools and the domestic kit of a Vlach mountain household, and the Archaeological Museum — a modernist building by the architect Vassilis Fatouros that opened in 1971 — holds finds from all over Chalkidiki, built around the donated Lambropoulos collection of Palaeolithic and Neolithic material. Together they explain the peninsula far better than any guidebook can.

Polygyros is first recorded in a Byzantine imperial document with a golden seal, a chryssovoulon of the emperor Nikephoros III Botaneiates, in about 1080 — one of the earliest mentions of any settlement on the peninsula under a recognisable name. The name itself is not settled: the usual derivations run from poly and gyros, "much round", a reference to the amphitheatric shape of the town, or from poly and ieros, "much holy", pointing to a temple that no longer exists.

Antiquity on this peninsula belongs not to Polygyros but to Olynthos and the cities around it, and that is why the story below is about Olynthos. Olynthos was the seat of the Chalcidian League, a federation of thirty-two cities, which Philip II took apart and destroyed in 348 BC, bringing the whole of Chalkidice into the Macedonian kingdom, and the Romans followed in 168 BC. That history is exactly what the Archaeological Museum was built to hold.

Under the Ottomans Polygyros belonged to the sanjak of Thessaloniki. On 17 May 1821 the people of the town rose against the Ottoman garrison and briefly drove it out — one of the earliest coordinated risings anywhere in Greece — and were burned out in retaliation. The town was burnt again for its part in the failed rising of 1854. Greek troops entered on 2 November 1912 during the First Balkan War, and the town has been rebuilt, expanded and settled with refugees from Asia Minor ever since.

Polygyros itself is a hill town 560 metres up, with no beach and no intention of having one; the sea is roughly thirty kilometres away at the nearest point. What the town has instead is the whole of Chalkidiki spread around it, and each of the three peninsulas has a completely different character.

Kassandra, the western finger, is the crowded one — Sani, Skala Fourka, the beach clubs and the package holiday trade, with the best sand on the peninsula. Sithonia, the middle finger, is wilder and longer, running down to the hamlets of Porto Koufo and Sykia past coves that you reach by boat or on foot. Athos is the eastern finger, and it has been a monastic republic with its own statute since 960, which you cannot simply drive through.

Closer to the town the interest is inland rather than coastal: Arnaia, 24 km up on the Cholomontas road, is a properly preserved Vlach village; Aristotle was said to have died at Stagira, further east on the eastern slope of the hill; and the long, cold winters that make the peninsula empty in February are the same winters that turn the carnival into the event of the year.

Polygyros eats like the rest of inland Chalkidiki: mountain produce, not seafood, with the coast handled as a day trip rather than a nightly table. The best things to look for are the local cheeses, the olive oil from the older groves around Arnaia, honey from the chestnut forest, and whatever is in the Saturday market in the square. Grilled meats and pies are the default taverna order. If you want the fish, eat it at Kassandra or Sithonia instead of here.

February is the month to come if you want Polygyros at its most alive — the carnival runs over three nights in the second half of the month, and the town fills with visitors from across Greece. May to June is the best time for walking: the mountain is green, the temperature is comfortable, and the beaches on Kassandra and Sithonia are quiet before the July rush. September and October are good for the same reason and for cheaper rooms. August is hot and crowded, and January is genuinely quiet unless you are here for the preparations.

Polygyros lies about an hour from Thessaloniki airport by bus or car, which makes it a practical base for the peninsula. From there Kassandra is a further 45 minutes and Sithonia 90.

Book accommodation well ahead if you are coming for the carnival, because the whole town fills. The museums are free and both are worth the hour. Drive carefully on the mountain roads to Arnaia in winter, which can be genuinely icy, and remember that the archaeological site of Olynthos is a ruin in a field rather than a preserved monument.