Anatoliki Makedonia – Thraki
Nine hundred and thirty square kilometres of coastal wetland strung along the Thracian shore — the Nestos delta and the last of its alluvial forest, two lakes, and the lagoons of Porto Lagos with a monastery on an islet in them.
The Εθνικό Πάρκο Ανατολικής Μακεδονίας και Θράκης is not one place but a chain of them, running east along the Thracian coast from the mouth of the Nestos to the reedbeds behind Maroneia. It was declared on 17 October 2008 by joint ministerial decision 44549, gazetted as ΦΕΚ 497/Δ — four protection zones, A to Δ, subdivided into sixty-seven sub-zones over 929.47 square kilometres of delta, lake, lagoon and salt marsh across the regional units of Kavala, Xanthi and Rodopi. The wetlands had been Ramsar sites since August 1975; the park was the belated act of drawing one boundary round them.
The Nestos reaches the sea after two hundred and thirty kilometres from the Rila mountains, where it is the Bulgarian Mesta and where two-thirds of its basin lies. Its delta was once floored with alluvial forest, which Turkish speakers called Kotza Orman, the big forest: more than twelve thousand hectares of it, with trees reaching forty metres. Civil-war burning in the late 1940s began the clearance and a decision in 1952 to convert the rest to arable land finished it through that decade. Four hundred and fifty hectares survive across the two banks, fenced and under strict protection, and they remain among the largest lowland riparian woods in the Balkans. They also hold what is probably the last native population of the black-necked pheasant in Europe, Phasianus colchicus colchicus, uncrossed with farm-reared stock — which is why releasing pheasants east of the Nestos is prohibited.
East of the delta the water turns odd. Lake Vistonida — around forty-five square kilometres, mean depth under three metres — is fresh at its northern end, fed by the Kosynthos, Kompsatos and Travos, and brackish at its southern, where channels join it to the Porto Lagos lagoons and the sea. On two islets stand the monastery of Agios Nikolaos, built in 1904 as a dependency of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, and the chapel of Panagia Pantanassa, both reached by wooden footbridges. Who owns the lake has been disputed since the 1930s, and Vatopedi's claim to it was the centre of the land-exchange scandal that broke in Athens in 2008, the same year the park was declared. The catch is thinner than it was: the Thracian shad, Alosa vistonica, endemic to this lake alone, was last recorded in 1995 and declared extinct by the IUCN in October 2024. Farther east, Lake Ismarida, or Mitrikou, is the only freshwater lake in Thrace and averages about a metre deep.
More than three hundred bird species have been recorded in the delta alone. Winter puts Dalmatian pelican and white-headed duck on Vistonida and flamingos across the lagoons and salt pans; pygmy cormorant moves through on passage; the spur-winged lapwing breeds here, in one of its very few European footholds. The antiquity is as dense. Vistonida is the ancient Bistonis, whose king Diomedes kept the man-eating mares of Heracles's eighth labour and ended inside them; Abdera, on the shore between lake and delta, was founded by Heracles for Abderus, whom the mares got first. Herodotus put the eastern limit of the European lion at the Nestos, and the wine Odysseus used on the Cyclops came from Ismaros, the ridge behind Maroneia.
What's worth knowing before you go
Kavala's airport, Alexander the Great, sits at Chrysoupoli on the delta's edge, a short drive from Keramoti — fishing harbour, ferries to Thasos every half hour or so on a thirty-five-minute crossing, and the park's Nestos delta information centre. Porto Lagos, twenty-five kilometres south-east of Xanthi and thirty-one west of Komotini, has the second centre and is the base for Vistonida and the lagoons; Xanthi and Komotini are the towns to sleep in. The Egnatia motorway runs inland for the whole length of the park, which makes it easy to get from one wetland to the next and easy to miss all of them. April and May are the best months, and November to February the best for sheer numbers. July and August are genuinely poor: flat white light, low lagoons, the migrants gone, and mosquitoes in the delta forest that will decide the length of your walk for you.
What catches people out is that the surviving Kotza Orman is fenced. There is no wandering in off the road: the way through it is the organised trail that starts at the information centre in Keramoti. Take the first hour after sunrise in April, when the cock pheasants are crowing, and you will hear them well before the light gets down through the canopy.