Kavala
Kavala is mostly a transit. Most travellers arrive 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 is a missed afternoon. Spend at least one night, and walk the old town on the headland; the city has more layers than the airport-and-ferry function suggests.
The Panagia headland, a fortified peninsula above the harbour, holds the Byzantine castle at its tip and the Imaret on its southern flank. The Imaret, an Ottoman almshouse-and-religious-school built in the 1820s, was endowed by Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Albanian-born governor who ruled Egypt as an effectively independent power for forty-three years and was himself born in Kavala. It is now a small luxury hotel; the central courtyard, with the running fountain and the rows of low domes above it, is open to non-guests for a coffee. His statue stands above the harbour.
The Kamares aqueduct, a stone Ottoman water bridge of around sixty arches built across a central ravine, is the most photogenic late-Ottoman engineering work in Greece. It was completed under Suleiman the Magnificent and the system fed the city's fountains for centuries. Walk under it on Megalou Alexandrou street.
Forty kilometres north-east of Kavala is Philippi, the Roman colony where the Apostle Paul preached his first sermon on European soil in 49 AD and was briefly imprisoned. The site is UNESCO-listed and is the largest accessible Roman city in northern Greece, with a forum, two basilicas, and a theatre carved into the hillside. The story of Paul's encounter with Lydia, the merchant of Thyatira who became the first European convert to Christianity, is told beside the small stream where she was baptised.
Kavala is the airport for Thassos. Two nights in the city and onward to the island is the right shape, with one day devoted to Philippi. Eat fish at the harbour; the catch is genuinely local.
House Notes
The Imaret
The Imaret on the Panagia headland — Muhammad Ali Pasha's almshouse and seminary, completed in 1813 and left to decay through the twentieth century. Anna Missirian, a Kavala resident, took the lease from the Egyptian state in the mid-1990s and restored the sixty-one rooms in twenty-two months. The hotel reopened in 2004; the building remains the property of the Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf. The pedigreed address on the headland.
Mehmet Ali's house
Mehmet Ali Pasha was born in Kavala in 1769 and lived in the house until the age of thirty. The eighteenth-century mansion, the largest in the town at the time at three hundred and thirty square metres, stands on Mohammed Ali Square in the Panagia old town with a view over the harbour. Two units joined at the first floor — the Selamlik for the men, the Haremlik for the women — restored at the turn of the twentieth century with funding from the Egyptian state.
Philippi
Philippi was a Thassian colony called Krinides until Philip II annexed the region in 356 BC and gave the city his name. The Battle of Philippi was fought on the plain below in 42 BC, when Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius and ended the Roman Republic. UNESCO listed the site in 2016 for the urban layout, the Basilicas A and B, the forum, and the theatre cut into the acropolis slope.
Krinides
The Krinides mud bath, three kilometres from Philippi — a thermal-clay and hydrotherapy centre run by the Municipality of Kavala, open from mid-June through 30 September, Tuesday to Sunday. The waters and clay have been read therapeutically since Homeric times; the modern facility carries the clay-bath pool, a hydrotherapy hammam, and a renovated outdoor garden. Treatments are taken in series, three or four mornings in a row.
Domaine Costa Lazaridi
In the Drama plain north of Kavala on the lower slopes of Mount Falakro, Domaine Costa Lazaridi at Adriani — 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. The estate now runs to 230 hectares; the Amethystos label is the house's flagship, the Cava Amethystos its sparkling. Tastings by appointment.
The tobacco warehouses
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kavala was the Balkan capital of oriental tobacco — its port shipping the Macedonian basma worldwide, the great brick warehouses still standing across the lower town. The Municipal Tobacco Museum on Palaiologou Street carries the only dedicated Oriental-tobacco-processing exhibition in the world: Ottoman monopoly paperwork, merchant furniture, leaf-processing machinery, the tobacco merchants’ archives.
Kasta
Forty minutes west by car at Amphipolis, the Kasta Tomb — the largest tumulus ever found in Greece, dated to the last quarter of the fourth century BC and entered for the first time in 2014. Two two-and-a-quarter-metre caryatids stand inside; the pebble mosaic on the floor shows Hermes leading the abduction of Persephone. The occupant is disputed between Alexander's mother Olympias and his companion Hephaistion; the chamber is open to specialist groups only.
The Philippi museum
The Archaeological Museum of Philippi holds the finds from the site in two units: the ground floor (380 square metres) runs from the prehistoric period to the end of Roman antiquity — inscriptions, sculptures, vases, coins, jewellery; the first floor (205 square metres) carries the Early Christian city through its decline in the 7th century, with architectural members and mosaics. A single ticket joins the museum to the adjacent UNESCO site.
Palia Mousiki
Palia Mousiki, the old Halil Bey Mosque on the Panagia headland — built around 1530 over the three-aisled Early Christian basilica of Agia Paraskevi (its foundations visible through the glass floor of the mosque). The Municipality of Kavala's orchestra rehearsed in the prayer hall between 1930 and 1940, and the name 'Old Music' comes from those years. Now open to the public; the madrasa houses folklore collections beside it.
Savvas
On the eastern harbour edge, Savvas — the fish tavern opened in 1996 by Savvas Theodosiadis, now in the hands of his sons Alexandros and Manos. Fresh, fried, and grilled fish, prawns, crayfish, seafood pasta, mussel pilaf; tables under the palm trees when the weather permits. Year-round, in a city where the summer crowd does not control the dining clock.