In antiquity, the mountain and the town were known as
Cissus.
Homer states that
Cisseus was the king of this town. The town and its people are mentioned as members of the
Delian League in the 5th century BC. A
Roman-era and early Byzantine
aqueduct led from the mountain to
Thessaloniki, and was kept in use throughout the centuries. It was repaired by the 12th-century
Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos and later in
Ottoman times. A settlement and fortress are attested in the same location by 1383, when they were attacked by the Ottomans, and were razed by the Ottoman prince
Musa Çelebi around 1412. During the 1422–1430
Siege of Thessalonica, the location was disputed between Ottomans and
Venetians, but apparently captured by the former in 1428. The village became seat of an Ottoman district () in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1912 the Greek town was liberated.
The Massacre of Chortiatis The
Chortiatis massacre was a
World War II mass murder of 146 civilians by the
Wehrmacht, at the end of the
occupation of Greece by the Axis powers on 2 September 1944. After an attack on two German soldiers, one German chemist and two Greek collaborators by the
Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) on
mount Chortiatis, where the two collaborators and the chemist were killed, the German occupation authorities decided to react immediately with a
reprisal operation against the civilian population of the village Chortiatis. About twenty trucks with German soldiers and the paramilitary force
Jagdkommando Schubert, named after the Wehrmacht
sergeant Friedrich Schubert who was in command, surrounded the village. They gathered all the people they found in the town square. One group of the civilians was led into the house of villager Evangelos Ntinoudis. They were locked inside and burnt alive. The other group was locked in the bakery. Schubert's men set up machine guns to make sure that no one could flee out of the bakery. But one 6-year-old girl managed to flee with help of the others outside a window which was unprotected. The others were burnt alive. Apart from the people who were killed in the two groups, others were raped and killed outside their homes or even in the village, while trying to escape. A total of 146 civilians residents of Chortiatis were killed that day. 109 of them were women and girls. One week later the Germans came back and set the whole village on fire. 300 homes were burned down. ==References==