“In a straight line, Bulgaria is less than 500 meters from here,” says Panagiotis Savvidis, moving his finger to show me an imaginary line reaching the neighboring country. The border region where we are, a few kilometers outside the village of Petritsi in central Macedonia, hides under the lush vegetation the signs of its long and rich military history. Outposts, anti-tank lines and machine gun bunkers are scattered around us. It is hard to imagine what went on on these narrow back roads, where the only sound we hear is the roar of traffic from the nearby Egnatia highway and the rush of the Strymonas river flowing through the forest area.
This is exactly what Savvidis, journalist and founder of the Angistro Drasi social cooperative, wants to reverse. In recent years, Savvidis has been shedding light on parts of the military past of the Greek-Bulgarian border, through thematic tours of the pre-World War II fortifications of the Metaxas Line – a chain of fortifications designed to protect Greece in the event of a Bulgarian invasion and named after then-Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas – but also more recent Cold War-era defense projects. Kathimerini followed him on one of these tours to the mountains of Serres.
Verdun as a model
The meeting point was in a clearing. We drove up in a dusty jeep and a small group of visitors, mostly families with children, followed in their cars. “In 2016 I was in Verdun in France, one of the largest battlefields of the First World War. There I saw that an entire local community lives from history. A town with about 30,000 inhabitants lives from military tourism,” he told me on the way.
Battlefield tourism is one of the most popular categories of “dark tourism” (a special form of tourism that involves travel to places associated with death, suffering and tragedy) and has been systematically developed in many European countries over the past decades. In some of these places, visitors can stay overnight in fortresses to recreate, albeit on a modest scale, the circumstances of another era.
Born and raised in Serres, Savvidis quickly realized that such a trend perfectly fits the profile of his region and could help it significantly financially, giving a boost to local hotels and restaurants. He founded his company in 2017 with friends, villagers and collaborators to trace the most interesting paths in the mountains leading to fortresses and to clean some tunnels.
“In 2016 I was in Verdun in France, one of the largest battlefields of the First World War. There I saw that an entire local community lives from history. A town with about 30,000 inhabitants lives from military tourism.”
“In the northern part of the Serres region alone, there are five of the 21 fortresses of the Metaxas Line, the largest Greek construction project of the 20th century,” he says. The tours organized by his group cover a longer historical period, starting from the interwar period until the mid-1990s.
The first stop is an abandoned outpost. “When my father took me and my brothers fishing, we were checked at this checkpoint and had to hand over our IDs. There were a lot of army personnel there at the time because Bulgaria (then under communism) was seen as a threat from the north. I’m talking about 1975,” he explains. The path becomes a dirt track and we start climbing up the mountain. He stops to the right and left to show us hatches where the army stored ammunition, ready to blow it up from a distance if enemy troops tried to approach. The visitors seem delighted by this information.
A few meters further on, the hike begins. The final destination is an arcade of Fort Paliouriones, which Savvidis’ team has cleaned and prepared for a guided tour. The trek leads through a lush green forest. We hike on a hill opposite Fort Roupel. During the Second World War, all these mountains were cleared to increase the army’s visibility. Savvidis describes the difficult days before the German army invaded. “There were not many soldiers because most of them were fighting on the Albanian front against the Italians. Most of the reservists here were 40 and 50 year old men from our region. That’s why the areas here suffered a lot of losses in the war.”
By exploring and cleaning the galleries, Savvidis had the opportunity to get closer to the soldiers who were deployed at the time and to discover real treasures. “We found letters, letterheads, helmets and local newspapers belonging to soldiers,” he tells us. One moment he still remembers well is when he found a copy of the newspaper Fos from April 4, 1941. “Only the officers read the newspaper, just enough to know what was going on. This newspaper arrived here the next day, April 5. In a few hours the German army’s attack would begin.”
“Paliouriones and Roupel kept the strait impregnable and the Germans did not come,” he says, trying to explain to visitors the location and the historical significance of the site. In the middle of the mountain, visitors can observe an anti-tank line made of tracks from the Peloponnese Railway. Savvidis points to the bullet holes in some of them, as well as the year they were built: 1898. The line was built to stop enemy tanks so that Roupel had time to target them. “Many battles took place here,” he says.
At the end of our walk, an impressive cannon can be seen protruding from under an overgrown bunker. It is “very Instagrammable,” he jokes. In fact, members of the group stand in front of it and take selfies before beginning the descent into one of the arcades of the Paliouriones Fort.
Walking through the fortress’s narrow corridors, several metres underground where the light diminishes considerably, is an experience in itself and the Agistro Drasi team strives to enhance this feeling. At the first intersection, a man dressed as a World War II soldier holds a lantern and shows us the way, while loudspeakers echo with gunfire. Inside the gallery, Giorgos Polychrous, a historian specialising in war preparations during the tenure of Ioannis Metaxas and now working as a tour operator, takes the lead. “The fortresses were built to have a constant temperature of 14 degrees Celsius all year round,” he explains. Polychrous decided to enter the field of “dark tourism” after seeing the fortresses up close. “I could not have imagined the size or grandeur of the fortresses. It is one thing to read about them and quite another to do field research: to see them, to walk through them, to understand the conditions under which they were built and how they have survived to this day.”
Realizing the power of this feeling, he joined forces with Savvidis to realize their vision of transforming the region’s historical wealth into an attractive tourism product while keeping historical memory alive. They started the first themed routes just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out and tell us that interest in the tours has been high.
The biggest challenge for their project is that the forts and the area surrounding them belong to the Ministry of Defense. Local government officials have raised the question of whether they can be used by local communities. Savvidis and Polychrous were more optimistic about the future when they recently heard Defense Minister Nikos Dendias say that the ministry and the government were in absolute agreement to leave the forts to the local population and society as a whole.
They say such a move will help preserve and highlight these important military bases and boost economic growth in the region, which already attracts tourists visiting Lake Kerkini and the thermal springs of Agistros.
