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Administrative Region : Central Macedonia
Regional unit : Serres

Nigrita (Greek: Νιγρίτα) is a town and a former municipality in the Serres peripheral unit, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Visaltia, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit.[1] It is situated between the Strymonian plain of the Strymon river and the Vertiskos mountains featuring the mountaintop Trani Rachi to the southwest. Nigrita is located in the southwestern part of the Serres peripheral unit. The Thessaloniki peripheral unit is found to the southwest. Nigrita is located S of Serres, W of Amphipolis and Kavala, N of the Via Egnatia, NE of Thessaloniki and E of Lagkada.

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The main football (soccer) team in Nigrita is the Nigrita FC.

History

Nigrita was the administrative economic centre in the wide area during the Byzantine and the Ottoman rule. Nigrita was first mentioned in a tax register in the 15th century and second in the Serrean Papasynadinou Chronicle.

In the later years of the Ottoman Empire, Nigrita along with the surrounding villages, was a municipality of the old kaza Serres, which in the final years of the Ottoman period were of Greek origin. The city and its surroundings did not have a Bulgarian population because the city and the area (also known as Little Greece or the Greek quarter (Köcök Yunan) was mainly a Greek-speaking region and it was hostile to other ethnicities.

The economy was developed in the 18th and the early 19th centuries, with also an increase to the population. The main agricultural products were cereals, wine, cigars, cotton, sesame and aniseed. The main industries were silk and animal trade which made the economy of the area flourish during that period.

The economic lifestyle in Nigrita and the area during the last years of the Ottoman rule was sufficient, and could not foresee a Macedonian problem. A few years later, Macedonian business activity peaked and began to decline.

One of the most important Nigritian persons was Athanasios Argyros, a legalist with many works, president of the Athenian Pan-Macedonian Society and later, a politician of the Serres prefecture and Ministry of Farming and Education.

Nigrita's people knew how fierce the Ottomans were over the disarmament among the Ottoman youth, in 1910. Nigrita became part of Greece in 1912 following the Balkan Wars. Nigrita at the time was in turmoil with captain Giagklis who fought in the Balkan Wars for the liberation of Nigrita from the Turks (Ottomans). Refugees of the Greco-Turkish War arrived in the 1920s.

Nigrita and its surroundings were also in the national resistance front against the German occupation during World War II. Nigrita was constituted in the area around Strymon.

Subdivisions

Division of the municipality