The claim that Farsala stands on the site of ancient Phthia — the Homeric home of Achilles and his father Peleus, capital of the Myrmidon kingdom — has always been contested, but it persists. A Cyclopean wall survives near modern Farsala, along with a vaulted tomb from the Mycenaean period, physical evidence of Bronze Age habitation. Whether Achilles was born here or in the lower Spercheios valley further south, the statue in the main square of Farsala makes the local preference clear.

Classical Pharsalos had its own political weight. The tetrarch Daochos ruled from here and wielded enough influence to administer the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and conduct the Pythian Games. He built monuments at Pharsalos dedicated to members of his family; portraits from those monuments, in the classical style, show subjects in youthful vigor. Later the city joined the Macedonian Kingdom under Philip II, was fought over by Aetolians, Thessalians, and Macedonians in two Macedonian Wars, and eventually passed into the Roman Republic's sphere.

The moment that left Farsala permanently marked on the historical map came in 48 BC. Julius Caesar defeated Pompey in the fields of the Pharsalian Plain, a battle that Roman writers would argue about for centuries and that changed the trajectory of the Republic. The whole area suffered destruction in the fighting. Exactly where the battle occurred is still debated — most modern scholarship places it north of the Enipeas, near the village of Krini — but the name Pharsalos was attached to the event and stuck.

Under Ottoman rule, Farsala went by the Turkish name *Çatalca*. It was a market town in a largely agricultural region, and not much documentary evidence of that period survives in the physical fabric of the city — the 1954 earthquake and a World War II bombardment together erased whatever historical and medieval buildings had stood.

The city returned to Greek sovereignty in 1881, after the Convention of Constantinople transferred Thessaly from the Ottoman Empire to the Hellenic Kingdom. Within sixteen years, Farsala was in the news again: the Battle of Farsala in 1897, during the First Greco-Turkish War, was fought in the vicinity of the town. The Greek forces were defeated in that engagement, a painful episode in a brief and disastrous war.

The Farsala that visitors see today is largely a product of the late twentieth century — low apartment buildings, wide streets, the compact density of a provincial Greek town that rebuilt itself after earthquake and war. The population of the municipal unit is some thousands; the municipality as a whole, which absorbed three neighboring areas in the 2011 Kallikratis reform, covers nearly 740 square kilometers.

What Farsala makes, and what it is proudest of, is halva. The rice-flour-based confection produced here has a regional reputation in Greece — softer and more unctuous than the tahini halva found elsewhere, it is sold in shops throughout the town and exported across the country. The agricultural hinterland that surrounds the city produces cotton and livestock; the town's textile industry has been a secondary employer. But ask someone where Farsala halva comes from, and they will tell you: from here, from the plain, from the town on the ridge above the Enipeas.

A few kilometers from modern Farsala, the remains of Xylades — a fortified site near the Enipeus — mark one candidate for the ancient settlement of Palaepharsalus, the 'Old Pharsalus' mentioned in ancient sources. The site was associated by ancient writers with the Thetidium, a holy place dedicated to Thetis, the sea-nymph mother of Achilles. F. L. Lucas, the British scholar, argued in the 1920s that the battle of 48 BC was fought north of the Enipeus near modern Krini, on or near the site of Palaepharsalus. The Cyclopean wall near modern Farsala, some polygonal stone, a vaulted tomb — these fragments invite questions that archaeology has not fully answered. The plain is patient. The hills hold their ground.