Drama

Drama sits on a fertile plain at the foot of Mount Falakro in Eastern Macedonia, a town whose very name recalls water. The ancient Greeks knew it as Hydrama or Dyrama, meaning rich in springs, and water still defines its character. At its heart lies the Park of Agia Varvara, where a hundred springs bubble up into clear pools and channels shaded by plane trees, feeding a network of streams that thread through the town. The park takes its name from the small church of Saint Barbara, the town's patron, and has been counted among the finest urban green spaces in Europe.

Around the springs spreads the old quarter of Varosi, with its restored mansions, narrow lanes and Byzantine churches, a reminder of the tobacco wealth that shaped Drama in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The town is unhurried and genuinely lived-in, more a place to slow down than to tick off monuments, and its cafes and tavernas fill with locals rather than tour groups.

Drama is also a natural base for the wild landscapes that surround it. To the north rise the peaks of Mount Falakro, home to a small ski centre in winter and cool walking country in summer, while the ancient forest of Elatia, sometimes called Karadere, cloaks the slopes towards the Bulgarian border. The region's long association with Dionysus, god of wine, lives on in the vineyards of the surrounding plain and in local winemaking that has been revived in recent years.

The town is at its most magical in December, when the Agia Varvara park is transformed into Oneiroupoli, a large Christmas village that draws visitors from across northern Greece. Spring brings the springs to full flow and the plain into blossom, while autumn colours the surrounding forests.

Drama is reached most easily by road, with regular buses from Thessaloniki and Kavala, whose airport lies about forty kilometres to the south.