The Archaeological Museum of Karditsa holds the finds from the whole regional unit, from the Neolithic period to Roman times. Its most important material comes from ancient Metropolis, a city on the plain south of the town, including the sculptures and architectural pieces of an Archaic temple of Apollo.

The Folklore Museum covers the more recent past — costumes, tools and the equipment of a farming life that has largely gone.

In the town itself, the municipal market building and Pafsilipo Park are the two things worth walking to. The park is a wooded public garden with a small lake, laid out on the edge of the centre.

Lake Plastiras

Until 1959 this was a highland farming basin called Nevropoli, with the Tavropos river running through it.

Nikolaos Plastiras, the soldier and politician, came from a village on its edge. Visiting after severe floods in the 1930s, he is said to have looked at the valley and remarked that one day there would be a lake here. The dam was built with reparations money owed by Italy, by a French contractor, and it was finished in 1959.

The result is a lake that looks entirely natural: deep blue water at about 800 metres, enclosed by slopes of fir, beech and chestnut, with villages hanging on the hillsides above it. It supplies Karditsa with water, irrigates the plain and produces electricity.

A road runs the whole way round, about forty-five kilometres, and it is one of the better drives in central Greece.

The Agrafa

West of the lake, the Agrafa are the southern end of the Pindus and among the least inhabited mountains in Greece. The name means unwritten, because the Ottoman administration never managed to register these villages for taxation.

This is serious walking country, with old paths between remote settlements, and it continues south into Evrytania.

Twenty villages sit around Lake Plastiras, most of them looking down at the water.

Neochori and Pezoula are the largest and have most of the guesthouses. Kalyvia Pezoulas and Belokomitis are smaller and quieter. Kastania stands higher, in chestnut woods.

Away from the lake, Kanalia and Rentina are stone-built villages in the hills, and Morfovouni is where Plastiras was born.

None of these are museum villages. They are lived in, and most have one taverna.

On the lake

Kayaking and rowing run on the water, and there are boat trips. The road around the lake is a well-known cycling route, and mountain-bike trails run off it into the woods.

Horse riding centres operate on the western side, with rides through the forest and along the shore.

Walking

Marked paths run around parts of the lake and up into the Agrafa. The country here is steep and wooded, and the routes are best in spring and autumn.

In town

Karditsa has an unusually extensive network of bicycle lanes for a Greek town of its size, and bicycles are the normal way to move around the centre.

Loutra Smokovou, thirty-five kilometres southeast of Karditsa, is a small spa settlement hidden in a wooded ravine at 450 metres, among oaks and plane trees.

The springs have been formally recognised as therapeutic, and the water is used for both bathing and inhalation treatment. The conditions it is prescribed for are respiratory, rheumatic and dermatological.

The place has a history. German troops destroyed it in 1943 after learning that a resistance officers' school was operating there. It was rebuilt in the 1950s, and by the middle of the 1960s it was the fourth most visited spa town in Greece.

This is farming country, and the food is what the plain and the mountains produce.

Meat is the centre of it — pork and lamb, spit-roasted or slow-cooked. Cheeses come from the mountain flocks: feta and the soft white manouri. Honey comes from the fir and chestnut forests around the lake.

The plain grows the vegetables and the grain, and there is wine from the lower slopes.

Around Lake Plastiras the tavernas serve mountain cooking rather than Thessalian plain cooking — game, pies, and trout from the fish farms.