Serres

Serres sits on the Strymon plain with the river running south of it, and it has the compactness of a city that has always been a crossroads: the Romans had a station here, the Byzantines made it a mint, the Ottomans a provincial capital, and today the railway still brings students and goods in. The acropolis above the town is the thing to climb to first, for one surviving tower — Orestes’ Tower, put up in 1350 with an inscription naming Stefan Dušan — and for the view over the whole plain. Down below, the old town is a warren of low houses, and the Agioi Anargyroi church keeps the 1817 frescoes that the city’s guilds paid for. Serres has one other claim to fame that has nothing to do with monuments: its silversmiths. The craft goes back to antiquity, and the modern workshops still turn out work of a quality that turns up in major European collections, which makes it one of the few places in Greece where you can buy the tradition rather than the souvenirs. The Valley of Agioi Anargyroi, a green dip right in the city with cafés along it, is where the locals actually sit.

Serres is older than almost anything else written about it. Herodotus mentions a city here as Siris in the fifth century BC, and the archaeology suggests the settlement was founded early in the second millennium, well before the Trojan War, on a steep hill now called Koulas that guarded the road down the Strymon valley. The Byzantines rebuilt the town around 803 and strengthened the fortress; the acropolis as it stands is largely ninth-century work on a seventh-century BC site. The citadel was wrecked by the Bulgars in 1205, rebuilt, besieged by the Serbs in 1345, and rebuilt again by Stefan Dušan, who made Serres the capital of his empire — his tower is the only part of the fortress left. The Ottomans took the city in 1383 and it became a fief of Evrenos Beg; the first mosque and the old baths went up in 1385. Serres ran its own mint from 1413 and grew into one of the busiest commercial towns in Ottoman Macedonia, with cotton as the dominant commodity and a market of some two thousand shops. Cotton eventually gave way to tobacco in the late Ottoman period, but the older trade had already left its mark: the city’s silversmithing tradition, which had begun under the Byzantines, is still working. A great fire in 1849 destroyed most of the town’s thirty-one churches, and the Bulgars burned much of the old quarter again in 1913; Agioi Theodoroi, the eleventh-century former metropolitan church and the finest Byzantine monument in the city, was reduced to rubble and rebuilt between 1938 and 1959. Serres is now the second-largest city of Central Macedonia, a trade centre for tobacco and grain, and a manufacturing town as well.

Serres sits inland on the Strymon plain, and the sea is a long way off: the Aegean at the Strymonian Gulf is around seventy kilometres east, while Lake Kerkini, with its reed beds and its birdlife, is nearer at about fifty kilometres west. The plain itself is the reason to be here — among the most fertile in northern Greece, and worked for centuries — with the river running south of the city through open farmland. The regional unit rewards a car. Lake Kerkini is the headline: a man-made lake of shallow water where flamingos, pelicans and Dalmatian pelicans breed among the reeds, ringed by small villages that are good for eating what the lake and the surrounding farms produce. The Belasica mountains close the valley to the west. Angistro, on the Strymon, is home to the Historical Park of Kroustas, a large open-air park where animals range in enclosures shaped by the river.

Serres cooking is Macedonian and generous: grilled meats, beans in every form, filo pies filled with greens or cheese, and the strong cheeses of the northern plain. The city is a market town in the old sense, and the covered bazaar at Eleftherias Square is the place to see what the Strymon valley produces. Cotton and tobacco made the city rich; the food that reflects that wealth is the pastry and the grilled lamb rather than anything elaborate. Look for the local bean dishes, which are the thing most worth eating in the old town, and finish with a tsipouro from the northern distilleries. In the villages around the lake the cooking turns to fish and to the dairy of the Kerkini farms.

Spring (April to May) and autumn (September to October) suit Serres best, when the Strymon plain is green or golden and the acropolis is comfortable to stand on. Summer (July to August) is peak season and genuinely hot in the plain, but the old town’s stone and shade make it bearable, and it is the season for festivals. Winter is cold, wet and often grey here, though the Serres carnival in the weeks before Lent is a serious local event worth timing a trip around. Lake Kerkini is at its best for birdwatching between late spring and early autumn.

Serres is served by regional trains running north from Thessaloniki through Kilkis, departing from the city's central station on Monastiriou Street. It is not on the Athens–Thessaloniki intercity axis, so many visitors continue to the town by road or KTEL bus from Thessaloniki. The nearest major airport is Thessaloniki International Airport "Makedonia".

Climb the acropolis first thing in the day — the light on the plain is best early, and the tower is the one thing in Serres you should not miss. Then walk down into the old town towards Agioi Anargyroi, which is where the city actually lives. If you want to buy silver, go to a working workshop rather than a shop and ask to see what is being made; the craft is the point. Combine the day with Lake Kerkini if the weather is clear, and with Kilkis or Drama if you are crossing Macedonia. Serres sits on the railway, which makes it the easiest of these three towns to reach without a car.