Vardar
The Vardar or Axios is the longest river in North Macedonia and a major river in Greece, where it reaches the Aegean Sea at Thessaloniki. It is long, out of which are in Greece, and drains an area of around. The maximum depth of the river is.
Etymology
The name Vardar for the river may have been derived from Thracian, although Dardanian, Paeonian, Ancient Macedonian, and Ancient Greek were also spoken in the lands drained by the river.The modern Vardar is thought to derive from an earlier *Vardários, which may ultimately derive from Proto-Indo-European *wordo-wori- "black water". The name Vardários was sometimes used by the Ancient Greeks in the 3rd century BC. The same name was widely used in the Byzantine era.
Vardar/Vardarios may be a translation of Axios, which may be Thracian and may have meant "not-shining" from PIE *n.-ski. The oldest known name of the river, Axios, is mentioned by Homer as the home of the Paeonians allies of Troy. Pjetër Bogdani would use the form Asi, an earlier Albanian-language name for the river.
This same hypothetical Thracian Axio- meaning "dark, not-shining" is theorized to be found in the name of a city at the mouth of the Danube, called Axiopolis in Greek and Axíopa in Thracian, which may later have been translated into Slavic as Cernavodă, also meaning "black water".
Geography
The river rises at Vrutok, a few kilometers southwest of Gostivar in North Macedonia. It passes through Gostivar, Skopje and into Veles, crosses the Greek border near Gevgelija, Polykastro and Axioupoli, before emptying into the Thermaic Gulf in Central Macedonia, west of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. The river forms a large delta along with Loudias and Haliacmon at the Axios-Loudias-Aliakmonas National Park.The Vardar basin comprises two-thirds of the territory of North Macedonia. The valley features fertile lands in the Polog region, around Gevgelija and in the Thessaloniki regional unit. The river is surrounded by mountains elsewhere. The superhighways Greek National Road 1 in Greece and M1 and E75 run within the valley along the river's entire length to near Skopje.
The river was very famous during the Ottoman Empire and remains so in modern-day Turkey as the inspiration for many folk songs, of which the most famous is Vardar Ovasi. It has also been depicted on the coat of arms of Skopje, which in turn is incorporated in the city's flag.