Trikala - History

History

The region of Trikala has been inhabited since prehistoric times and the first signs of life in the cave of Theopetra are reach back to approx. 49,000 BC. Neolithic settlements from 6,000 BC have been discovered in Grand Kefalovriso and other locations.

The city of Trikala is built on the ancient city Trikka or Trikke, which was founded around the 3rd millennium B.C. and took its name by the nymph Trikke, daughter of Penaeus, or according to others, daughter of Asopus river. The city was an important center in Antiquity as the birthplace and main residence of Asclepius. In the region existed indeed one of the most important and ancient asclepieia. The city is mentioned in Homer's Iliad as having participated in the Trojan War with thirty ships under Asclepius' sons Machaon and Podalirius. In the Mycenean period, the city was the capital of a kingdom, and later it constituted the main center of the Thessalian region of Estaiotis, which occupied roughly the territory of the modern Trikala Prefecture.

In historical times, the city of Trikke and the surrounding area of the river experienced prosperity. It fell to the Achaemenid Persians in 480 BC, while ten years later it joined the Thessalian monetary union. In 352 BC it was united with the Macedonia of Philip II. The city became a location of hard battles between Macedonia and Rome. While Philip V of Macedon and his son Perseus tried to keep the city, after 168 BC it fell to the Roman Republic.

In the early centuries AD and during the Byzantine era the region was conquered by many intruders: Goths (396), Huns (447), Slavs (577), Bulgarians (976-1025), Normans (1081), Catalonians (1309–1311) and from 1204 by the Franks, while for a short period it was part of the Despotate of Epirus. The city's current name first appears in the early 12th century, in Anna Komnene's Alexiad. The city was conquered by the Ottomans in 1393, and after an extended period of decline it became an important center of cottage industry, with famed woolen textiles and leather products. The city also constituted an important intellectual center for a time during the Ottoman domination (1543-1854) with the Trikke School (and later Greek School), where famous intellectuals of the time, such as Dionysios the Philosopher, taught.

On 23 August 1881 with the Treaty of Constantinople between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece, the city passed in Greek sovereignty, along with the remainder of Thessaly. It fell again under Turkish sovereignty briefly during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Afterwards, Trikala played a fundamental role in the rural workers' mobilizations in the early 20th century against the Thessalian landlords and was the scene of the foundation of first Agricultural Cooperative in Greece, in 1906.