Florin's webcam. Panorama
Florina is a city in Greece, located 663 meters above sea level, on the river Sakoulevas, 370 km northwest of Athens, 130 km west of Thessaloniki and 55 km northwest of Kozani. Administrative center of the community of the same name (dima) and the unit of the same name in the periphery of Western Macedonia.
The population is 17,686 inhabitants according to the census of 2011.
Florina originated in the Byzantine period. The city's name probably comes from the Byzantine φλῶρος "green" - because of the climate and vegetation of the region. The Slavs (who make up about 50% of the city's population) call Florina - Lerin. The city rejoined Greece in 1912. After the Byzantine Empire, it belonged to the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and then the Ottoman Empire.
There was a significant Turkish and Slavic population in the city, but after the forties of the twentieth century, the number of Slavs decreased significantly. There were also fewer Turks and Jews. After the forced exchange of population imposed by the Kemalist Turkey in 1922, almost the entire Turkish population of the city and the nome moved to Turkey, and in their place came the Greek refugees from Asia Minor, particularly from Pontus.
During the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the mountains surrounding Florina became the scene of fierce battles between the government Royal Army and the pro-Communist Greek Democratic Army. In 1949 the Democratic Army made a desperate attempt to occupy the city in order to declare it the provisional capital of Free Greece, but despite the fact that its units penetrated the city, could not hold it. 800 soldiers of the Democratic Army were buried in a mass grave in the center of the city.
In 2009 the Greek Communist Party bought the site in order to build a monument over the mass grave.
