Xanthi

Xanthi has the best-preserved old town in northern Greece, and what endures here is not any single building but the fabric — the cobbles, the low ceilings, the bay windows carved with rosettes and a woman’s breast as a blessing for the household. The houses went up after the earthquakes of 1829, laid out amphitheatrically against the hillside with the Kosynthos as a natural border, and they were built by masons from Epirus and western Macedonia who brought their own building vocabulary with them. In September, during the old town festival, the lanes fill and people put chairs out into the street. The clock tower in Dimokratias Square is the anchor — twenty metres, put up in 1870 by a tobacco merchant — and beside it the bazaar still runs on Saturday mornings. Down by the river there are bridges and a walk that goes on as long as anyone is willing to let it. What surprises people is how recent all of this is. This is not a museum town. The people in these houses work in the modern city on the other side of the water, and the two have grown into each other.

Like Komotini, Xanthi has an older self than the present city. It was fortified in Byzantine times, and the remains of that castle still stand on the hill above town: an irregular trapezoid of roughly 24,400 square metres, its enceinte running 760 metres and preserved in places to a height of twelve. The modern city grew at the foot of that hill, on the plain between the Rhodopes and the Nestos. Its wealth came from tobacco. The region’s leaf was recorded as among the finest and most expensive in the Ottoman Empire as early as 1715, and by the late eighteenth century Xanthi was shipping through the ports of Kavala and Porto Lagos to the Danubian Principalities, Russia, Austria and Egypt. The money built the mansions and the warehouses, dozens of which survive along the south-eastern edge of town, among them the great Π-shaped warehouse of the Ottoman Régie. The city as it stands today was largely rebuilt after the destructive earthquakes of March and April 1829, which destroyed what had been there before; the old town dates from 1830 onwards. It was declared a site needing special protection in 1976 and formally listed in 1995, by which point around 590 buildings had been registered. Christians and Muslims have lived side by side here for centuries — the Ahrian and Çinar mosques stand within streets of the Cathedral of St John the Baptist — and the city’s other great export is its carnival, the largest of its kind in northern Greece.

Xanthi stands about thirty kilometres from the sea: Porto Lagos and the Vistonida lagoons are close, and Fanari and Agia Paraskevi on the Thracian coast lie about thirty-five kilometres south. Inside the city the river is the water, and the Kosynthos runs through it past bridges and tree-lined banks. Further out the regional unit is a tobacco country with a long memory. Abdera, half an hour south-west, is the site of one of the classical world’s most famous philosophical schools — Democritus and Protagoras came from here — and its excavations are still being worked. Genisea, a market town further west, still has the handsome Pamouktsoglou house and an old school turned folk art museum. Stavroupoli, up in the Nestos valley, carries the traces of the tobacco money in a huge plane tree shading its square and the Evangelistria church beside it. Beyond these, the Pomak villages — Sminthi, Myki, Pachi, and the old town of Echinos — climb the mountain slopes, where the summer air is cool and the architecture is unlike anywhere else in Greece.

Xanthi was a tobacco town before it was anything else, and its food is Thrace’s food built on the produce of the plain: soutzoukaki, grilled lamb, giant beans, pies, and vegetables that come out of the ground sweet. The city’s own sweets are a tradition rather than a souvenir — soutzouk loukoum with grape must and walnuts, and flogeres, the tahini and walnut pastries, found in the old-town bakeries and in the confectioners named for Frosynoula, the woman crowned Miss Xanthi in 1929. The weekly bazaar in Commerce Square is the place to see what the region actually eats. Order whatever the grill has done that day, add the local cheese, and finish with tsipouro from the region. The Rhodopes behind the city supply the herbs and the wild greens that turn up on plates here in a way you do not get on the islands.

Spring (April to May) and autumn (September to October) suit Xanthi best. Spring is green, the Kosynthos is in spate, and the Rhodopes are still cool; autumn brings the harvest and the first warmth after a wet winter. Summer (July to August) is peak season: hot but dry, and the old town festival fills the lanes in September. Winter is wet and often grey, but the carnival — Xanthi’s is the largest in northern Greece — falls in February, and the old town is at its quietest and best for walking.

Xanthi is reached from the Egnatia motorway (A2/E90), which runs past the city on the north-south axis; the municipality puts it 205 km from Thessaloniki, 120 km from Alexandroupoli and 700 km from Athens. Komotini lies 50 km away across the plain on the same road. The railway still passes through the town on the Thessaloniki-Alexandroupoli line, but passenger services east of Serres were suspended in 2019 and replaced by road, so there is no train. Kavala's airport is the closest air gateway, with Thessaloniki the usual international route in.

The Old Town is the reason to come, and it is best on foot, ideally in the late afternoon when the square fills. Start at the Clock Tower in Dimokratias Square and walk up toward the castle hill, or down toward the Kosynthos; the two ends of town are ten minutes apart and feel like different places. Get to the bazaar on Commerce Square on a Saturday morning if you can manage it. The mansions are private homes, so look up at the bay windows and the carved door lintels rather than expecting to go in — except at the museums, which are the exception worth making. Komotini, an hour east across the plain, is the other half of this journey and holds the older Ottoman monuments.