Ganos occupies a dramatic position on the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara, beneath Mount Ganos, whose slopes offered precisely the climate and soils that viticulture demands. According to researchers Armstrong and Günsenin, the town itself grew up not from farming or fishing but from the harbor — the loading point for the wine that the monasteries of Mount Ganos produced and the kilns of the coast packaged. The relationship was circular and self-reinforcing: more wine meant more demand for the distinctive pear-shaped amphorae the local potters made, which in turn meant more laborers, more population, more kilns. By the late 11th century, Ganos had even begun producing glazed ceramics — a sign of both prosperity and technological advancement, since the new lower-temperature glazing methods then spreading across the Byzantine world made it economical at last to glaze pottery in ordinary kilns. The ceramics were decorated not with the fashionable Kufesque motifs common elsewhere in the empire, but with simple linear designs, suggesting they were made for local households rather than distant markets.

The specific container Ganos made for its wine — classified by archaeologist Nergis Günsenin as 'Günsenin I' — is one of the more recognizable artifacts of medieval Mediterranean trade. Small and pear-shaped, ranging from 28 to 48 centimeters tall, they differed from ancient Greek and Roman amphorae by lacking the pointed toe that allowed those vessels to be stacked upright in sand. Several Byzantine shipwrecks discovered in the waters around Ganos have been found loaded with more than a thousand of these amphorae at a time, and identical vessels have turned up at archaeological sites across an astonishing geographic range. Kilns producing this type of amphora have been identified not only at Ganos but also at nearby Chora and at two sites on Marmara Island, whose kilns probably used clay shipped from Ganos itself. The monastery on Mount Ganos appears to have been the organizing force behind the wine trade, likely owning ships and employing skilled shipbuilders in town — though the texts are silent on the details, and Günsenin's conclusions rest on analogies with other documented monastic centers.

Few places have endured quite as much disruption as Ganos and kept producing wine regardless. In 813, Bulgarian forces under Khan Krum pillaged both the mountain and the town; those who had taken refuge there were killed or carried off. A second Bulgarian raid under Tsar Symeon devastated the town again in 914. The Catalan Company — the Spanish mercenary force that terrorized Byzantine Thrace in the early 14th century — captured Ganos in July 1306 and held it for roughly a year. A severe earthquake on 6 November 1344 damaged the town alongside the nearby communities of Chora and Marmara. Another earthquake struck in 1354, after which the Ottomans absorbed the territory. In 1766, yet another severe earthquake hit. The earthquake of 1912 was destructive enough to completely destroy the village center. Each time, the kilns and the vineyards eventually resumed. The Catalan raids interrupted ceramic production briefly, but it recovered. The Ottoman conquest reduced wine output but did not end it. Even today, the area around Gaziköy remains wine country, with major producers such as Doluca alongside smaller local wineries.

Ganos was more than a trading port. By the 6th century, the geographer Hierokles listed it as a city — a polis — in the province of Thrace, and Constantine Porphyrogennetos described it in similar terms in the early 10th century. The 12th-century Arabic traveler al-Idrisi praised the spacious streets and busy shops of Ganos and the nearby town of Panion. Spiritually, the settlement rose from an ordinary diocese subordinate to the metropolitan of Herakleia to an archbishopric in 1324, and then to a full metropolitan diocese by December 1329. In that year, Metropolitan Menas of Ganos sat among the church leaders at a synod in Constantinople. Later, the diocese merged with neighboring Chora to form the eparchy of Ganos kai Chora — Ganochora — which a 1715 register listed as one of the five metropolitan dioceses of eastern Thrace. At its height the town maintained a cluster of churches: the Metropolis dedicated to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the Hagios Nikolaos and Hagios Charalampes on the acropolis, and the church of the Theotokos by the shore.

The present-day village of Gaziköy sits below the old acropolis, and the hill above still holds fragments of what was once a substantial fortified town. As of 1922, much of the fortification wall and its towers were already in ruins, and in the following decades several church buildings were torn down, leaving only foundation walls. On the beach at the eastern outskirts, chunks of marble of unclear function lie scattered — probably remnants from antiquity or the early Byzantine period. A fountain with an Ottoman-era inscription stands nearby, alongside two large fragments of ancient stone, one of which may have been a sarcophagus lid. In the village center, a second fountain bears an inscription dated 1817. Excavated kiln sites confirm ceramic production spanning the 10th through 13th centuries, and many Byzantine inscriptions have been recovered from the site, including a fragment of a 12th- or 13th-century metrical text. The legend traces the settlement all the way back to the companions of Byzas, the mythical founder of Byzantium — a founding story that may say more about Byzantine civic pride than Bronze Age history, but which captures something true about how old the human attachment to this coastline runs.