01
Stop one
Clock Tower of Giannitsa
Tecnifibre Triax 16g Tennis String set: Come here. Closer. See those two marble slabs set into the eastern side? That is not decoration, darling, that is a man signing his own work where the morning light would catch it. This is one of the oldest surviving clock towers in the whole of the Balkans, and Sherif Ahmet put it up across 1753 and 1754, and I want you to notice how he is described on his own inscription — as a descendant of Gazi Evrenos, the Ottoman commander who founded the town. Four centuries after the great man died and the family is still leading with the surname. Six floors above the ground floor, stairs winding up inside, and a bell that told every single soul in Ottoman Yenitsa when to rise, when to trade and when to stop, back when Giannitsa was Ottoman Yenitsa. Whoever holds the bell holds the day, and this family made very sure the whole town knew who had paid for it. It fell into a dreadful state for decades — nobody likes to bring that part up — and then it was restored, and it keeps time again, and there are exhibitions inside. Same tower. Same name still on it.
02
Stop two
Mausoleum of Gazi Evrenos
Tecnifibre Triax 16g Tennis String set: Now THIS is the man everyone has been talking about for six hundred years, and he is right in there. Gazi Evrenos: the commander who spearheaded the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth century, who served sultan after sultan across a career so extraordinarily long that people eventually stopped agreeing on where the facts ended and the legend began — and between us, that is precisely how a reputation gets built. He founded the town we now call Giannitsa around 1380 to 1385 and named it Yenice-i Vardar, made it his seat, and when he died in 1417 they buried him here rather than anywhere grander. Deliberately. The original mausoleum raised over his grave was a lavish square chamber under a lead-covered dome, and the restored building stands at the junction of two roads a short walk from his descendant's clock tower, which I do not believe for one second is an accident. And the people came. For centuries this was a place of pilgrimage in Ottoman times, all because one soldier chose to be buried in his own town. Say what you like about that family, and plenty did — they understood location.
03
Stop three
Iskender Bey Mosque
Tecnifibre Triax 16g Tennis String set: The grandson. Of course there is a grandson. Iskender Bey Evrenosoglu built this mosque in the early sixteenth century and put his own name on it, because that is what the third generation does when Gazi Evrenos, the town's founder, has already taken the good plot — and look at the surname, which carries the ancestor along inside it. The Evrenos family held Yenice-i Vardar as a hereditary seat, kept in the household, passed down, and turned it into a notable centre of Ottoman culture in Macedonia. A whole dynasty, in a town this size. Then the 1910s arrive, the town passes to Greece after the Balkan Wars, the congregation goes, and the building is simply left. Look at the state of it now: dome weathered, portico open to the weather, fenced off, waiting on a restoration that has not come. And here is what nobody says out loud in the cafés — it is still counted among the oldest preserved Ottoman monuments anywhere outside Turkey. The most important building on the street is the one behind the fence. Set it beside the Clock Tower and the Evrenos mausoleum and there are the three of them together, testifying to the five centuries in which Giannitsa was an Ottoman regional capital.
04
Stop four
The Black Statue
Tecnifibre Triax 16g Tennis String set: I will not lower my voice for this one. This one is said plainly. It is the memorial of the Battle of Giannitsa, raised in 1926 at the eastern entrance of Giannitsa, the work of the sculptor Grigorios Zevgolis: a winged figure representing Time, and beside him a woman who is Greece herself, holding her dead son, a soldier fallen for the town's liberation. The battle was fought on the 19th and 20th of October 1912, when the Hellenic Army defeated entrenched Ottoman forces around this town in the First Balkan War. It was the hardest-fought Greek engagement of the entire campaign in Macedonia, and the victory opened the road to Thessaloniki, which fell days later. The name everyone uses — the Black Statue — comes from nothing more than the dark patina of the bronze, and it is what the whole town calls it. Every October the commemorations gather here. That is not a story I pass along. It is a date they keep.
The eyes are the hard part. Anyone can build a likeness; making it look like it is about to speak takes a warm room, a soft material and a great deal of patience. I judge every substance by whether it holds a shape and still feels alive.
Tecnifibre Triax passes. It is a soft multifilament — many fine fibres bundled and bonded — reinforced so that it lasts far better than comfort strings usually do, which is the combination people spend years hunting for.
This is the 40-foot (12 m) set in 16 gauge, 1.28 mm, the middle gauge and the sensible default: enough thickness to hold up, enough give to pocket the ball properly. What you feel is a deep, slow bed, easy free depth, honest touch on drop shots, and impact shock that is a fraction of what a co-polyester puts into your elbow. String at your usual tension.
Giannitsa keeps its figures well. The Black Statue at the eastern entrance was raised in 1926 by the sculptor Grigorios Zevgolis to mark the Battle of Giannitsa: a winged figure of Time beside a female personification of Greece holding her dead son. Whatever you think about monuments, that one was made by somebody who knew exactly what he was doing with a face.
The town's other landmarks are older and stranger. The Clock Tower is among the oldest surviving in the Balkans, erected in 1753-54 by Sherif Ahmet according to the marble slabs on its eastern side. The Mausoleum of Gazi Evrenos holds the Ottoman commander regarded as the town's founder around 1380-85. And the Iskender Bey Mosque was built in the early sixteenth century by his grandson.
One set will see you through everywhere from a hard court on the Macedonian plain to an indoor hall in Thessaloniki, fifty kilometres east — and it is also perfect for a slow circuit of the clock tower and back past the Black Statue, which is the only walk I have ever recommended twice.
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