The tobacco city

Between about 1880 and 1940, Drama was one of the most important commercial towns in Macedonia, and tobacco was the reason.

The warehouses were built to hold and treat the leaf, and they are unlike anything else in Greek towns: four and five storeys of brick, with long rows of windows, designed by central European architects. The largest, built in 1924 for a Swiss tobacco merchant by an Austrian architect, is now a hotel. Others stand around the Agia Varvara springs, restored or waiting to be.

Alongside them are the mansions of the merchants, the neoclassical school building of 1907–1909, and the railway station of 1895.

What the warehouses also hold

One of the tobacco warehouses was used in 1943 to imprison the Jewish community of Drama before they were sent to the extermination camps in Poland. Almost none returned. A memorial and a plaque stand at the spot, near the open-air theatre in the Agia Varvara park.

Churches, mosques and museums

The city centre keeps the churches of Saint Nicholas and the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, along with Ottoman mosques; one of them has been converted into a cultural venue.

The Archaeological Museum covers the region from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Its best-known object is a marble head of Dionysus, which belongs to the older story of this place.

North of the city, on a wooded slope at about 750 metres, stands the Monastery of Panagia Eikosifoinissa, described as the oldest monastery still in use in Greece. It is a women's monastery and it is about thirty-six kilometres from Drama.

The springs in the city

The Agia Varvara park covers six hectares in the centre of Drama and is built around the springs that give the city its name. Water runs everywhere through it, under old trees and past a small church.

Local tradition says that when the Ottomans tried to pull the church down, water rose and covered it, and it was saved. On 4 December people still float candles on the water.

The park's layout was designed by a team from the university in Thessaloniki, and it was later shown in a European exhibition of notable public squares.

The Angitis Cave

Twenty-five kilometres northwest of the city, near the village of Piges, the Angitis river rises inside a cave and runs along its floor. You walk in beside the water.

French cavers explored it in 1978. More than twenty-one kilometres have been mapped, and five hundred metres are open to visitors, on a walkway above the river. Its other name, Maara, may come from an Arabic word for a small cave.

The mountains and the forests

Mount Falakro, about thirty-five kilometres north, has a ski centre and paths for walking and mountain biking in summer.

Further into the Rhodope are two forests that are unusual for Greece. Elatia, also called Karadere, is a spruce forest where trees reach sixty metres. Beyond it, the Virgin Forest of Frakto is one of the very few old-growth forests left in Europe — beech, fir and spruce that have never been cut. It is protected and access is controlled.

The Nestos river runs about fifty kilometres east, through gorges and then out into a delta full of birds.

Oneiroupoli

Since 2004, Drama has built a Christmas park in its municipal garden and main square, and it has grown into one of the largest events of its kind in Greece. It runs for about a month, entry is free, and it brings visitors from across the country and from the neighbouring Balkan states. Locals call it the Rovaniemi of Greece.

The film festival

The Drama International Short Film Festival takes place every September and is the main event of its kind in Greece, drawing filmmakers from across Europe.

Outdoors

There is skiing on Falakro in winter, paragliding from Korylovos at its southern end, and rafting and kayaking on the Nestos. The Nestos delta is one of the better birdwatching sites in northern Greece.

Wine

Drama came late to the Greek wine map and then changed it. Vineyards were planted here in earnest only from the 1980s and 1990s, but the combination of mountain climate and good soil turned out to suit both international and Greek grape varieties.

There is no protected designation of origin here, but three protected geographical indications — Drama, Adriani and Agora. Most of the wineries lie southeast of the city and around the old town of Adriani, which is also known for its tsipouro, and several are open to visitors with tasting rooms.

The connection is old. Grape pips from the Neolithic period were found at the village of Sitagroi, and a sanctuary of Dionysus at Kali Vrysi was in use until the fourth century AD.

The table

Local cooking here is more Anatolian and Balkan than southern Greek. Sorvas is a yoghurt soup, keskek is chicken cooked with cracked wheat, and there are cabbage pies, twisted pies, bombari and piroshki.

The plateau of Kato Nevrokopi grows the best-known potatoes in Greece, and the forests around Sidironero produce mushrooms that appear on menus all over the country.