Eastern Macedonia and Thrace: a mystical journey to Greece’s eastern border

Eastern Macedonia and Thrace: a mystical journey to Greece’s eastern border

When I left Athens one morning in early spring, driving east and leaving behind, with the city, everything we call the West, I had a dreamlike, almost mythical picture in mind: mountain roads, Byzantine villages, Ottoman towers, hard blue skies and the great bulk of Olympus. The quieter the roads became, the more that picture dissolved. What replaced it were the wide agricultural plains of Thessaly and, further north, the orchards of Pella, fields of peach trees that reminded me of my home town in northern Italy, under a low grey sky stubbornly hiding the summit of Olympus and all its secrets. The rain came with me the whole way. It ruined some plans. It also washed off every possible filter.

Slipping back into a provincial rhythm that felt like home, rain-fed meadows, locals watching you with a mix of surprise and curiosity, I entered the slow, suspended time that defines this part of Greece. Here history does not announce itself through temples or marble. It belongs to borders that kept moving and carried whole worldviews with them, visions that still insist they are opposed and yet, over centuries of peace and war, have produced a region with strong identities, a proud past and a present made of abandonment, of work, of a slow rediscovery of itself.

The road east

At Vergina the sky was one of those greys that leave no way out. The village looks like any other in the plain, a main street with a few more tavernas than usual, until you notice the visitors coming back up from underground, blinking, searching for light: beneath a grass-covered mound lie the royal tombs of Aigai, where Philip II of Macedon was buried with his golden armour.

Further north, at the foot of Mount Voras, the thermal baths of Pozar steam between the villages of Orma and Loutraki, open at all hours, all year round. I walked the canyon above the pools with Nektarios, who studied in Thessaloniki and chose to come back to his mountains; the clouds did not worry him at all. “These colours”, he told me, “are part of the charm: a destination for all seasons”. Lying afterwards in a hot natural pool beside a cold waterfall, rain prickling the surface, I believed him completely.

 

A sleeping giant on the way

Past Thessaloniki the route turns truly east, along the spine of the whole journey: the Via Egnatia, the Roman axis that connected the Adriatic to Byzantium, still traced today by the motorway that carries its name. Just before the border of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, at Amphipolis, restoration works have revealed for the first time the full marble enclosure of the Kasta Tomb, the largest burial mound ever found in Macedonia, from the years of Alexander. It is due to open to the public in early 2028 but for now, the mound remains quiet among the fields.

Kavala, facing east

The road eventually drops towards the sea at Kavala, where the Kamares aqueduct, raised in the age of Süleyman the Magnificent, still strides across the modern town, traffic passing under its arches as if nothing were unusual. For four centuries those arches carried water to the arid rock of Panagia, the old town, which climbs its peninsula in tight cobbled lanes, wooden balconies leaning over the street. At its heart stands the Imaret, lead-domed courtyards built as an Islamic charitable foundation by Mohammed Ali, born in Kavala in 1769 and later the founder of modern Egypt’s last royal dynasty; his equestrian statue stands beside an Orthodox church. Kavala keeps its Ottoman centuries in plain sight, a rarity in Greece.

Where Europe was baptised

It was here, at the port then called Neapolis, that Paul the Apostle landed around 50 AD before walking the Egnatia up to the city of Philippi. There, on the banks of the Zygaktis river, he baptised Lydia, a merchant of purple dye, the first recorded Christian convert on European soil. Standing at the open-air baptistery, at the spot where Christianity entered Europe on foot,  religion suddenly feels earthy and real.

In the low months the great site of Philippi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016, is nearly yours alone. The layers of history settle over one another in harmony, as in a painting: the Greek theatre, the Roman forum, the vast early Christian basilicas, and around them wet grass, birdsong, wind. In summer the ancient theatre fills for the Philippi Festival, running since 1957, with the 69th edition taking place from early July to early September 2026. Come outside those weeks and the stage belongs to the wind.

 

Into the Rhodope

The real reason for the journey comes last, though you quickly understand it would be worth coming back again and again, to do nothing but stay. North of Xanthi, whose old town mixes Byzantine churches, tobacco merchants’ mansions and Ottoman minarets, a lone road climbs into the Rhodope mountains, towards the Pomakochoria. These villages are home to the Pomaks, Slavic-speaking Muslims exempted by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne from the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, a community suspended between languages, states and centuries. There is nothing to consume here, just mosques with slender minarets against green slopes, terraced fields, a coffee offered simply because you stopped.

In the low season months, with the roads nearly empty and the colours turned down, Eastern Macedonia and Thrace stops performing the Greece visitors expect. What remains is quieter, older and somehow closer.