Vardar

The Vardar or Axios is the longest river in North Macedonia and the second longest river in Greece, in which it reaches the Aegean Sea at Thessaloniki. It is 388 km long, out of which 76 km are in Greece, and drains an area of around 25,000 km2 . The maximum depth of the river is 4 m .

The origin of the name Vardar derives from Thracian Vardários. It comes from Proto-Indo-European *wordo-wori- . It can be considered a translation or similar meaning of Axios, which itself is Thracian for 'not-shining' from PIE *n.-ski ). It is found in another name of the city at the mouth of the Danube, called Axíopa in Thracian, which was later translated into Slavic as Cernavodă . 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. The word may ultimately be derived from the PIE root werǵ-, which is also the source of the English work. Its name Axios is mentioned by Homer as the home of the Paeonians allies of Troy. Pjetër Bogdani would call it Asi, an earlier Albanian-language name for the river.

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