Lamia

By car

From Athens, 212 km (2 hours and 8 minutes)

From Thessaloniki, 297 km (3 hours and 2 minutes)

From Patra, 191 km (2 hours and 53 minutes)

From Ioannina, 245 km (3 hours and 32 minutes)

KTEL Fthiotida www.ktelfthiotidos.gr

City KTEL buses Lamia www.astikoktellamias.gr

By train www.trainose.gr

From Athens to Lamia in 3 hours.

From Thessaloniki to Lamia in 3 hours and 15 minutes

One account says that the city was named after the mythological figure of Lamia, the daughter of Poseidon, and queen of the Trachineans.

Another holds that it is named after the Malians, the inhabitants of the surrounding area.

In the Middle Ages, Lamia was called Zetounion, a name first encountered in the 8th Ecumenical Council in 869.

It was known as Girton under Frankish rule following the Fourth Crusade and later El Cito when it was controlled by the Catalan Company of mercenaries. In Turkish, it was sometimes called Izdin or İzzeddin.

The city was also known as Zeitoun, Zirtounion, and Zitonion.

Source: wikipedia.org

Archaeological excavations have shown the site of Lamia to have been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC).

In Antiquity, the city played an important role due to its strategic location, controlling the narrow coastal plain above Thermopylae that connected southern Greece with Thessaly and the rest of the Balkans.

The city was therefore fortified in the 5th century BC, and was contested by the Macedonians, Thessalians and Aetolians until the Roman conquest in the early 2nd century BC.

After Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC, the Athenians and other Greeks rebelled against Macedonian overlordship. Antipatros, the regent of Macedon, took refuge behind the substantial walls of the city (Lamian War, 323–322 BC). The war ended with the death of the Athenian general Leosthenes, and the arrival of a 20,000-strong Macedonian army.

Lamia prospered afterwards, especially in the 3rd century BC under Aetolian hegemony, which came to an end when Manius Acilius Glabrio sacked the city in 190 BC.

Little is known of the city's history after. In Late Antiquity, the city was the seat of a bishop (attested since 431), suffragan of Larissa, but had declined to obscurity: for instance, it is not shown on the 5th-century Tabula Peutingeriana. Some archaeological remains from the period have been found in the Castle (the city's ancient acropolis), including a basilica, coins and marble inscriptions, while the walls of the Castle are thought to have been rebuilt under Justinian I in the 6th century.

The city was occupied by Slavs in the 7th century, and re-appears only in 869/70 under the name of Zetounion, probably deriving from a Slavic word for "grain".

The city of Lamia played once more a role in the Byzantine–Bulgarian wars of the late 10th century due to its vicinity to Thermopylae: it was near the town that the Byzantine general Nikephoros Ouranos scored a crushing victory over Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria in the Battle of Spercheios in 997.

In the 12th century, the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela recorded 50 Jewish families in Lamia.

Following the Fourth Crusade (1204), the city was captured by the Frankish crusaders, who made it the seat of a barony of the Duchy of Athens. The Knights Templar held the city for a time and rebuilt its fortress.

In 1218 it was captured by Epirote forces, and was surrendered again to the Franks of Athens in 1275 as a dowry. The Catalans held the city from 1318 until 1391, and then passed to the Acciaioli Dukes of Athens. The fortress was razed by the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I in 1394.

The Byzantines temporarily recovered control of the city in 1403–26, but the Turks recaptured it.

From the 1440s on, Lamia came under firm Ottoman control, remaining so until it became part of the newly independent Kingdom of Greece in 1832.

Until the annexation of Thessaly in 1881, it was a border city (the borders were drawn at a site known as "Taratsa" just north of Lamia).

Source: wikipedia.org

Edited by: Yallou