Nigrita (Greek: Νιγρίτα) is a city and a municipality in the Serres regional unit, Macedonia, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Visaltia, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit.[2] The municipal unit has an area of 160.888 km2.[3] It is situated in the wide plain south of the river Strymonas, at the northern foot of the Kerdylio mountains, in the southern part of the Serres regional unit. Nigrita is located 22 km south of Serres, and 92 km northeast of Thessaloniki.
History
Near Nigrita have been found several sites of ancient settlements of the Hellenistic and Roman times. One of them was perhaps the site of the ancient city Bisaltia, capital of the Bisaltae, which is known by Stephanus of Byzantium.[4]
In the Ottomantahrir defter (number 7) of 1478 (Hijri 883),[5] the settlement is recorded as a village with the name Nigrita, within the kaza of Siroz.[6] At the beginning of the 19th century, it was a prosperous town where cotton, silver and copper were processed. The town became a part of Kingdom of Greece until after the 1913 Second Balkan War.
According to the statistics of Vasil Kanchov ("Macedonia, Ethnography and Statistics"), 2,500 GreekChristians lived in the village in 1900.[7]
Subdivisions
The municipal unit Nigrita is subdivided into the following communities:
^[1]Archived 2017-04-24 at the Wayback Machine D. C. Samsaris, Historical Geography of Eastern Macedonia during the Antiquity (in Greek), Thessaloniki 1976 (Society for Macedonian Studies), p. 109, 115. ISBN960-7265-16-5.
^Özkılınç, Ahmet; Coşkun, Ali; Sivridağ, Abdullah; Yüzbaşıoğlu, Murat, eds. (2003). 167 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-ili Defteri (937/1530) I (in Turkish). Ankara, Türkiye: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü. p. 9. ISBN978-975-19-3673-8.
