I know this isn’t a very helpful map. It shows the mountains which are visible from Pangaeo (see Easy Pieces on Easy Mountain Walks in order of easiness, No1, Pangaeo). I’ve written in Drama, a nice place to stay, between Falakro and Pangaeo. And Thessaloniki. You can fly there. Apparetly you can see Olympus too, though it’s 150 miles away. To the north is Bulgaria, and poor FYROM: Greece has recently conceded that it be called North Macedonia. And not far to the east is Turkey. This was the last part of Greece to achieve independence, though strangely not from the Ottomans: after the first Balkan war, when Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia fought for their ndependence against the Ottomans, Thrace became part of Bulgaria, but after the second Balkan war it became part of Greece, not much more than a hundred years ago, and a hundred years after the first small Greek state was formed in the Peleponnese.

The main road to Bulgaria leads west from Drama skirting the foothills of the mountain before swinging north; giving glimpses of Falakro to the north, the mountain. You turn right to the village of Volakas, ans from the there the road to the ski centre ascends windingly through attractive forest to come out onto a summit region of more or less rounded slopes. It ends in a broad bowl which somewhere else might be a lake but here is a car park. There is probably room for a thousand cars here, but on May 28, 2019 mine was the only one. I spent a joyful solitary day wandering; never was I more than half a mile from the car park, and the landscape might be said to be monotonous, as might our Pennine fells, but the variety of flowers was fabulous. Is it possible to reclaim the word ‘stunning’?

The preface to the Easy Walks was just beside the road, where it runs along almost flat for a kilometre or so before arriving at the car park. Like the road on Pangaeo this one has slopes open to the south with long views, including Pangaeo itself, and on the right hand side, the upside, it is cut into a short, steep bank, but there are easy ways up the bank onto meadows where hundreds of orchids were in flower, and I was lucky enough to find the last fritillaries, their season being almost over.

And this extraordinary furry pedicularis, (common on our british mountains is the lousewort, its more ordinary relative):

My first easy walk from the car park took me up the easy slopes to the north west, and when I dam down again, before setting off on the other side, I met an Austrian camper van. An elderly – probably a few years younger than me – woman stepped out of it, we were each surprised to see the other. Her husband, she said, had seen no reason to get out of the van, no doubt he was disappointed, after a long, winding, inviting ascent to find himself at the bottom a shallow bowl surrounded by largely smooth slopes with no view, nothing picturesque or dramatic. I couldn’t encourage her to take even a few steps off the tarmac to see gentians or primulas or crocuses or saxifrages, but she was intrigued to look through the viewfinder of my camera to see some of the flowers I had just photographed, and she seemed to admire what she took as my adventurous spirit.

My second easy walk led up to the south of the car park. I said that the landscape was monotonous in order that you might share in the surprise I had after walking up over an even slope where snow had recently melted and a wonderful trio of flowers had broken through the crust of dead grasses: Erythronium dens-canis, pink with strange soft brown markings on the leaves, blue Scilla bifolia and rich yellow Crocus chrysanthus.

Suddenly I came to the edge of a long line of ragged limestone cliffs, with precipitous spurs and spikes enclosing narrow gullies, falling more than a thousand feet to dense forest below. On tables of limestone just before the sudden drop were carets of evergreen mountain avens: Dryas octopetala, with its eight petalled flowers like an anemone. The dryas and the fritillary, the one at the beginning of its season, the other at the end, seemed to indicate the accidental perfection of the moment, my moment on the mountain.
While the climb up is of course not a complete doddle, it’s not very steep or long, and once you come to the cliffs you can easily follow them for a couple of miles – much further than I did. Not far along is a giant swallow hole: a crater formed by the erosion of the limestone until it collapses into caves far beneath the surface. The great depths of snow that fall and blow into the hole last all summer.

So as far as my Easy Walk categories go, well, categories and league tables always turn out to be more complicated than you think: this walk is number 2 but easily turns into something else, more like a 4 or 5, but still very easy for someone schooled on our own hills in the Lakes, or Snowdonia, or the Highlands of Scotland, unless your progress is slowed to a crawl by flowers in which case it still sits comfortably at number 2.

My third little Easy Walk on Falakro was over a low lip in the car park bowl and a little way down into a grassy valley where I found something new again: an iris whose cream coloured flowers seemed to try to make up in their extravagance for the shortness of their stems.

Two beauties found in many places on Falakro, wherever the soil was at its thinnest or bare rock won through: the yellow saxifrage which is also common on Pangaeo and an androsace which is not, Androsace villosa . These two often share the same stony space, which is surprisingly unusual among alpine plants, which seem to enjoy isolation, often splendid isolation. On the other hand gthe photographer often likes to choose specimens which are alone, without intrusions from scrappy grasses and other competitors, and so in his memory that preferred isolation is normalised.

You know how there’s a backlit glow to photographs on a computer, a glow which has the ability to ignite nostalgia? I was quite taken with some of my photos from Falakro the other day when I looked at them again, I hope they are illuminating and illuminated on your computer too.

I loved Falakro so much that I came back for another long day of going not very far, a couple of days later. The second time I walked across to the other side of the summit ridge where views open up to the north, up to and well over the border into Bulgaria, of what was one of the biggest pristine forests in the whole of Europe until the summer of 2023 when fires burned for more than two weeks which destroyed more than 250 square miles of woodland. I’ve said this already. I’m saying it again. But we have to be careful about using the word ‘destroyed’ of forests. There are fires which sette in and burn everything, gradually, the way a wood stove starts on the kindling and when enough heat has built up it burns big chunks of wood more slowly. And there are fires which race through consuming grasses and brushwood but never stop long enough to destroy big trees, like when you build a fire in the stove badly and the kindling flares up and dies leaving only scorch marks on the bigger logs. I have not been able to discover much about the extent of the damage.

I was there long ago in that golden age of 2019. To the north I saw dense forest and dark, cool cloud all the way into Bulgaria. At the few wooden shacks, dilapidated and almost picturesque, which seemed to mark the end of a ski run, cows sheltered from the rain, and in the car park massive redundant sheep dogs or cattle dogs lay down. No other human beings at all.

John Richards has an interesting section on Falakro in Mountain Flower Walks- the Greek Mainland.
He describes some of the riches I only glimpsed in a couple of short stops long the road leading to the car park. I did see an extravagant white salvia and big clumps of a rich yellow linum (flax.) Richards’ plant knowledge is deeply impressive. He can identify plant from a leaf or a seed head; and he knows, from the literature, what he has arrived too early or late to see in flower, and two of these – he was there in mid-may, two weeks before me – are the dryas and the fritillary which I mentioned above. It is as if my moment on Falakro opened up, was extended to such a generous compass! And he correctly guesses the whereabouts of a famous endemic, Haberlea rhodopensis, saying that he expects that it is to be found on limestone or marble cliff faces in the forest, exactly where I found it on what could be Easy Walk number 3 which took me from the village of Pyrgoi along a dry and dusty track into a lush green ravine where hundreds of the gorgeous haberlea hang from the rocks where it is thought to have survived the last ice age, and whereit now fourishes in secret many thousands of miles from its nearest relatives in the tropics. It’s only a particularly nasty dog which makes me unsure of including that little walk in this series. But more of this later.

Richards tells us that he only visited Falakro once, and he evidently lingered fruitfully on the way up, so I’m not surprised that he missed the amphitheatres of cliffs on the south side, but I am surprised that he tells us that ‘the mountain lacks many scenic features’ and that ‘we did not walk above the car park towards the summits, but the only habitat we could see in this highest zone were bare grassy slopes’, or that ‘From what we saw in May I would not visit the mountain after early June.’ Other writers have described the violas and campanulas and omphalodes, stunning, they say, which are to be seen in July.

Of course I realise that my envious and rivalrous thoughts about John Richards are of little interest to you so I’ll move on. Why haven’t I written to him?

I stayed in Drama and had a stupid little adventure finding my airbnb place, but in the end it was good. I learnt about the marble quarries. see Drama and I now realise that I have already posted lots of pictures of the flowers of Falakro in that piece, in the form of a slide show – I wonder how I did that? – as well as describing the walk to the haberlea gorge, but I rather skated over the dog story, so here it is. The track to the green sanctuary of the ravine set into the lower slopes of Falakro goes through heavily grazed, scrubby country where farm buildings are guarded by dogs. They are fairly easy to avoid, just take a wide circle around them and they won’t bother you. On the way back as I drew near the farm again I armed myself, feeling nervous, by picking up a few rocks and opening my pen knife, and then round the corner came a big lumbering old dog wagging its tail, and I laughed at my self, dropped the stones, put my knife away, said hello to the dog and walked on. Just then a great slavering brute baring its teeth came bounding round the corner towards me! So I took the advice I just gave you and gve his territory a wide berth: he didn’t follow me. But I would recommend this walk to anyone bold, careful and generally not scared of dogs, because the sudden entry into the dark cool ravine with its thick, damp leaf mould, its hazel and ivy which seem so northern, from the arid, colourless landscape and blinding white stones of the dry river bed would make it a good walk even without the magical haberlea. But given the dog, though it might well be dead by now, maybe only the softy is still alive, but given the uncertainty, and of course the fact that the friendly dog did seem to be the older one, now I think about it, and because the nervousness which might spoil your enjoyment, I’ll put it in at Easy Walk No 7. But you see how absurd these categories are.

Another place you might stay is Kavala, the port for Thasos, which has an attractive old town sloping up steeply from the harbour, some houses from Ottoman days and a huge ancient aqueduct up high above the town, not unlike the railway viaduct which dominates Stockport with its six millions bricks, according to a sign. Kavala is south of Pangaeo, so quite a long way from Falakro. It even has beaches.