Sérvia

The castle town of Servia commands the approaches between western Macedonia and Thessaly. Its fortifications climb a steep hill above the valley of the Aliakmon, enclosing the remains of churches and houses from a time when this was an important Byzantine stronghold. Later settlement spread below the walls, where the road carried travellers through the mountain country.

In the fourteenth century, Stefan Dušan's Serbian forces took western Macedonia amid Byzantine civil war. Servia eventually passed to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I in 1393. Christian inhabitants continued to live within the old castle, while Muslims settled on the lower ground. The seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi described a town of Greek, Muslim and Jewish quarters, with stone houses lining its steep streets. In the following decades, the growth of nearby Kozani drew commerce away from Servia.