The city below the rock

At the foot of the cliff, in a green area called Longos, is the only surviving part of ancient and medieval Edessa. Inscriptions show the city was organised as a proper town from the fourth century BC.

Its walls were built of large squared blocks in the late fourth or early third century BC, and they were more than two metres thick. They were rebuilt on a large scale in the third century AD, to protect the city against Gothic raids. The southern gate is one of the best-preserved pieces of fortification in Macedonia.

The ancient city had clay pipes carrying water to public fountains, a drainage system, and baths outside the walls. People lived there until the late sixth or early seventh century AD. After that they moved up onto the rock, where the acropolis became the Byzantine castle of Vodena.

The site is open to visitors, but it has not been fully presented: there are excavation trenches and temporary shelters, and it takes some effort to understand what you are looking at.

Varosi

Varosi is the old quarter on top of the rock, built where the ancient acropolis stood. Under Ottoman rule this was the Christian neighbourhood.

Its houses have been restored — painted timber-framed buildings in the Macedonian style, along narrow stone-paved lanes. The Byzantine church of the Dormition of the Virgin is here, with wall paintings of 1380. One restored mansion is open as a visitor centre about the quarter itself.

Near the town hall stands a Byzantine bridge, on a route that may have carried the ancient Via Egnatia.

The factories

At the end of the nineteenth century the falling water was free power, and textile factories were built to use it — among them a hemp works called the Kannavourgio, whose building still stands in the waterfall park. The railway reached Edessa in the 1890s and connected it to Thessaloniki, Veria, Florina and Monastir.

The waterfalls

The water comes down from Mount Voras, crosses the town, and drops off the cliff in several places.

Two falls are the large ones. Karanos is the vertical one, named after the first king of Macedon, and it is described as the largest waterfall in the Balkans. The Twin Falls are the other.

Behind Karanos there is a small cave with stalactites and a built walkway, so you can stand behind the falling water and look out through it at the plain below.

The park

You reach the falls through the Waterfall Park, which is the only way in. It is a shaded area of old plane trees, stone paths and small bridges, and it contains rather more than the falls: an information centre, a small aquarium of local freshwater fish and reptiles, a botanical garden, restored watermills, and the old factory buildings.

Together these make up the Open-Air Water Museum, created in 1993 to preserve the pre-industrial and industrial workshops that the river once powered.

Edessa is a cherry town. The orchards on the hills around it produce the Vodena cherries, which are eaten fresh, preserved as a spoon sweet, and made into dozens of other things.

Two times of year are built around them. When the trees flower, at the end of March and beginning of April, the Cherry Roads open — walking and cycling routes through the orchards towards the ancient city, past old wild cherry trees.

In June the Edessa Cherry Festival runs for about a week, with producers selling in the town, tastings at a mill in the water museum, and events across the town.