The city of Komotoni
The capital of Thrace, with a population of 37,298 (1991 census), Komotini is the seat of the District Council of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, capital of the prefecture of Rhodope and the province of Komotini, and the seat of the Municipality of Komotini, which includes the villages of Yfandes, Ifestos, Paradhimi, Mesohori, and Mikro and Meghalo Kranovounio. It is an important commercial, economic, cultural, and administrative centre and offers all the modern conveniences and facilities to be found in any other provincial city. Komotini is also the seat of the Metropolitan of Maronia and Komotini, the Prefect of Rhodope, the Democritus University of Thrace, the Court of Appeal of Thrace, and various Iocal public services, organisations, banks, and businesses.

The region of Rodopi and the city of Komotini are meeting points for different civilizations .There are multi-cultural areas with a large Muslim population which is the only officially recognized minority in Greece. It also hosts immigrants (coming mainly from the neighbouring Balkan countries) and Pontain-Greeks (repatriates) from ex-USSR Republics. Thrace is also an entrance point for refugees as it borders Turkey to the East and Bulgaria to the North.

The city is 32-38 m above sea-level and mostly flat. In the northern districts around Ayia Varvara St. the terrain starts to rise gently up to the southern fringes of the Rhodope Mountains. The layout of the streets is irregular and labyrinthine, particularly in the Old Town, in sharp contrast to the former refugee settlements and the district of Nea Mosynoupoli.

There is little tourist activity here, though Komotini has been a transit point to and from the East since time immemorial.

The River Boukloudzas used to flow through the city and cause considerable damage when it flooded. It was diverted in the early 1960s and its bed was filled in a little later: its old course is now a long avenue bearing the successive names of (from the Xanthi entrance) Archbishop Makarios, Ypsilandis, Democritus, Orpheus, and Democracy.

Sad to say, when the bed of the Boukloudzas was filled in the city's past was buried with it. "Europeanising" trends swept away Komotini's traditional features, particularly those arising out of an Eastern influence. The vanishing cobbled streets took with them the memories of that other Komotini which the younger generation knows nothing about: the covered market, the old inns, the baths, the tanneries, and the traditional social relations of yore. The legendary gardens which the Turkish traveller Evliya Tchelebi described in the seventeenth century and which still survived until a few decades ago are now gone for ever.

This over-hasty "modernisation" (in the worst sense of the word) has made it impossible properly to assess all aspects of the city's age-old history.

Nevertheless, in defiance of the times, a few secret corners still preserve memories of yesteryear: latticed windows, spacious courtyards and high protective walls, long-forgotten costumes, and above all human faces, living images of that other, futureless, Komotini, which still struggles passionately against the dizzying swirl of development. The secret charm of the Thracian capital...