Kavala
Overview
Kavala is mostly a transit stop. Most travellers land at the small regional airport, take a taxi to Keramoti or to the city port, and ferry on to Thassos within a few hours. That wastes an afternoon. Spend at least one night and walk the old town on the headland, because the city has more layers than its role as an airport and ferry stop suggests.
The Panagia headland, a fortified peninsula above the harbour, has the Byzantine castle at its tip and the Imaret on its southern side. The Imaret is an Ottoman almshouse and religious school built in the 1820s. Its benefactor was Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Kavala-born governor of Albanian descent who ruled Egypt as an effectively independent power for 43 years. The Imaret is now a small luxury hotel. Non-guests may take a coffee in the central courtyard, with its running fountain and the rows of low domes above it. A statue of Muhammad Ali stands above the harbour.
The Kamares aqueduct is an Ottoman stone water bridge of around 60 arches across a central ravine. It was completed under Suleiman the Magnificent, and the system fed the city’s fountains for centuries. Walk under it on Megalou Alexandrou street.
Philippi lies 40 kilometres north-east of Kavala. It is the Roman colony where the Apostle Paul preached his first sermon on European soil in 49 AD and was briefly imprisoned. The site is on the UNESCO list and is the largest accessible Roman city in northern Greece, with a forum, two basilicas and a theatre carved into the hillside. Paul met Lydia here, the merchant of Thyatira who became the first European convert to Christianity, and their story is told beside the small stream where she was baptised.
Kavala is the airport for Thassos. The right plan is two nights in the city and then on to the island, with one day given to Philippi. Eat fish at the harbour; the catch is local.
House Notes
The Imaret
The Imaret on the Panagia headland was Muhammad Ali Pasha’s almshouse and seminary, completed in 1813 and left to decay through the twentieth century. In the mid-1990s Anna Missirian, a Kavala resident, took the lease from the Egyptian state and restored the 61 rooms in 22 months; the hotel reopened in 2004, and the building still belongs to the Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments). It is the pedigreed address on the headland.
Muhammad Ali’s house
Muhammad Ali Pasha was born in Kavala in 1769 and lived in this house until the age of 30. The eighteenth-century mansion stands on Muhammad Ali Square in the Panagia old town, looking over the harbour, and at 330 square metres it was the largest in the town in its day. Its two wings, the Selamlik for the men and the Haremlik for the women, meet at the first floor and were restored at the turn of the twentieth century with funding from the Egyptian state.
Philippi
Philippi was a colony of the island of Thasos called Krinides until Philip II annexed the region in 356 BC and gave the city his name. In 42 BC Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius on the plain below, and the Battle of Philippi ended the Roman Republic. UNESCO listed the site in 2016 for its town plan, Basilicas A and B, the forum and the theatre cut into the slope of the acropolis.
Krinides
The Krinides mud baths, 3 kilometres from Philippi, are a thermal-clay and hydrotherapy centre run by the Municipality of Kavala, open from mid-June to 30 September, Tuesday to Sunday. The waters and clay have been used as therapy since Homeric times, and the modern centre has the clay-bath pool, a hydrotherapy hammam and a renovated outdoor garden. Treatments are taken as a series, three or four mornings in a row.
Domaine Costa Lazaridi
Domaine Costa Lazaridi at Adriani, in the Drama plain north of Kavala on the lower slopes of Mount Falakro, was the first modern vineyard in Drama, planted by Costas Lazaridis in 1979 after his years in the German wine trade. The winery building followed in 1986, and the estate now covers 230 hectares. Amethystos is the flagship label and Cava Amethystos its sparkling wine; tastings are by appointment.
The tobacco warehouses
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Kavala was the Balkan capital of oriental tobacco: its port shipped the Macedonian basma leaf worldwide, and the great brick warehouses still stand across the lower town. The Municipal Tobacco Museum on Palaiologou Street has the only exhibition in the world dedicated to processing oriental tobacco, with Ottoman monopoly papers, merchants’ furniture, leaf-processing machinery and the tobacco merchants’ archives.
Kasta
At Amphipolis, 40 minutes west by car, the Kasta Tomb is the largest burial mound ever found in Greece, dated to the last quarter of the fourth century BC and first entered in 2014. Inside stand two caryatids (columns carved as women), each 2.25 metres tall, and the pebble mosaic on the floor shows Hermes leading the abduction of Persephone. Whether it holds Alexander’s mother Olympias or his companion Hephaistion is disputed, and the chamber is open to specialist groups only.
The Philippi museum
The Archaeological Museum of Philippi holds the finds from the site on two floors. The ground floor, 380 square metres, runs from prehistory to the end of Roman antiquity, with inscriptions, sculpture, vases, coins and jewellery; the first floor, 205 square metres, follows the Early Christian city to its decline in the 7th century, with architectural pieces and mosaics. One ticket covers both the museum and the UNESCO site next door.
Palia Mousiki
Palia Mousiki is the old Halil Bey Mosque on the Panagia headland, built around 1530 over the three-aisled Early Christian basilica of Agia Paraskevi, whose foundations show through the glass floor. The Municipality of Kavala’s orchestra rehearsed in the prayer hall from 1930 to 1940, and the name, “Old Music”, comes from those years. It is open to the public, and the madrasa (the old Islamic school) beside it holds folklore collections.
Savvas
Savvas, on the eastern edge of the harbour, is the fish tavern Savvas Theodosiadis opened in 1996, now run by his sons Alexandros and Manos. The menu is fresh, fried and grilled fish, prawns, crayfish, seafood pasta and mussel pilaf, with tables under the palm trees when the weather allows. It is open all year, in a city where the summer crowd does not set the dining hours.
Anchorage Notes
The port
Kavala began as ancient Neapolis, the port of Philippi 14 kilometres inland and the harbour where the Apostle Paul first set foot in Europe. The modern city rises in tiers of mansions around the working port, under the great Kamares aqueduct of the sixteenth century. A yacht lies in the harbour of the largest city on the northern Aegean coast.
Panagia
Panagia is the old-town headland that closes the harbour on the east. Colour-washed houses and cobbled lanes climb to the Byzantine fortress at its summit, which looks over the whole gulf, and the old fishing harbour lies below the walls. A yacht lies under the peninsula and its citadel, in the old city.
Nea Peramos
Nea Peramos stands on the bay of Eleutherai, about 20 kilometres west of the city, under the Byzantine castle of Anaktoroupolis on the headland of Vrasidas. The twelfth-century fortress stands on the hill of ancient Oisyme, an important North Aegean harbour in Byzantine times, and the long sandy beach of Ammolofi runs below it. A yacht lies in the western bay under the castle.
Keramoti
Keramoti stands on a low sandy spit at the Nestos delta, about 30 kilometres east of Kavala. Refugees from Asia Minor settled the fishing village, now a small resort of one long beach and a quay street along the water. A yacht lies off the flat green edge of the delta, with the reed beds and the river mouth behind the sand.
Mythology
Orpheus
In the outline of the lost play Bassarides by Aeschylus, preserved by Eratosthenes, Orpheus turns from Dionysus to worship the rising sun and climbs Mount Pangaion before dawn to watch it rise. Dionysus sends his own followers, the Bassarides, to tear him apart on the mountain, and the Muses gather what is left of him for burial at Leibethra below Olympus.