Demetriás

Demetrias stands at the head of the Pagasaean Gulf in eastern Thessaly. Founded in 294 BC by Demetrius Poliorcetes, who gathered the inhabitants of several neighbouring settlements into his new city, it became a favoured residence of Macedonian kings. Philip V counted it with Chalcis and Corinth among the three strongholds that served as the fetters of Greece, commanding both the Thessalian interior and the sea.

The city endured into the Byzantine and Frankish eras, though its fortunes had changed. In the 1270s a Byzantine fleet defeated Venetian and Lombard opponents in the nearby battle of Demetrias. The Catalan Company sacked the town in 1310 and held it for much of the fourteenth century. From 1333 its inhabitants began to move towards neighbouring Volos; the Ottomans captured Demetrias in 1393.