Fur

Kastorians were working fur before the fourteenth century. The first written record is a patriarchal document of 1574, which entrusted the management of Mount Athos property to the guild of Kastorian furriers in Constantinople — a measure of how established they already were.

What made them distinctive was not the fur itself but the offcuts. In 1713 an Ottoman decree temporarily banned fur garments because raw material had run short, and Kastorian workshops turned to the chordades, the scraps normally thrown away, sewing them into whole garments. Doing it well required sorting skins by colour, type and even by which paw they came from — black fur was worked in ten or more distinguishable shades — and the trade developed specialist roles for each stage.

The skill spread with the people. From the nineteenth century Kastorian furriers and merchants emigrated in numbers and set up communities in Italy, Germany and Spain, and Kastoria became the specialist fur-processing centre of Europe.

The trade is under pressure now. Russian and Ukrainian buyers accounted for most of the market, and since 2022 much of that has gone.

The mansions and the churches

Fur money built the archontika, the merchants' mansions of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, concentrated in the Doltso and Apozari quarters. Several are open as museums, and their painted ceilings and enclosed upper floors are the best surviving domestic architecture of the period in northern Greece.

The town also holds more than seventy Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches, an extraordinary density for a place this size. Panagia Koumbelidiki, with its unusually tall drum, is the one people photograph. The Byzantine Museum holds the icons.

Dispilio

On the lakeshore four kilometres from the town, excavation uncovered a Neolithic lakeside settlement occupied from around 5500 BC — houses built on platforms over the shallow water.

Part of it has been reconstructed on the site as an open-air museum, and the finds include wooden structural remains preserved by the water, tools, pottery and seeds.

Argos Orestiko

Ten kilometres south, Argos Orestiko stands on the ground of the ancient kingdom of Orestis. Excavations have uncovered early Christian basilicas and the building that housed the assembly of the Orestians.

Its Archaeological Museum holds the finds, including a shield of the Paeonian infantry and an inscribed decree that is the most important political document to survive from western Macedonia.

The lake

Lake Orestiada wraps around the town on three sides. It is shallow, rich in fish, and one of the better birdwatching sites in northern Greece — herons, cormorants, ducks and pelicans use it.

A footpath and cycle route runs around the whole peninsula, about nine kilometres, at the water's edge below the cliffs. It passes the Mavriotissa monastery, an eleventh-century foundation with external frescoes, and the Dragon's Cave, a small show cave with lakes and formations inside.

The mountains

Mount Grammos rises on the Albanian border west of the town, reaching 2,520 metres. Near its summit lies Gistova, one of the alpine lakes that Greeks call dragon lakes, at 2,307 metres. Nestorio is the base for walking here.

Vitsi, to the north, is lower, wooded and has a small ski centre.

Nostimo

At the village of Nostimo, thirty-five kilometres from Kastoria, there is a petrified forest. The fossilised trunks show that this mountain country was a coastal region around twenty million years ago.

The Koresteia villages, north towards the border, are built of brick made from red clay and straw, which gives whole settlements a reddish colour that is unlike anywhere else in Greece.

Nestorio, twenty-eight kilometres west, sits on the Aliakmon at the foot of Grammos, in thick forest. Every summer it hosts a large open-air music festival on the riverbank.

Nearer the town, Mavrochori and Aposkepos are lakeside villages with traditional houses, and Polykarpi sits among apple orchards with paths down to the water.

Kastoria has dishes that are genuinely its own and are hard to find elsewhere.

Sarmades are rolls of pickled cabbage — armia — stuffed and slow-cooked, and they are the winter dish here. Keftedes makalo are meatballs served in a thick sauce of garlic, tomato and flour. Grivadi sto tava is carp from the lake, baked in the oven.

Armiopita, a pie made with the same pickled cabbage, and ryzopita, a rice pie, appear on fewer menus but are worth asking for. Wild mushrooms from the mountain forests are fried simply.

The vineyards of western Macedonia grow Xinomavro, the region's red grape, and there are wineries around the lake open to visitors.