In the antiquity, mountain and town were known as Cissus and Homer tells us 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. The modern name and town Chortiatis can be traced back to the 12th century, when a Byzantine monastery under the name Chortaites, on the northern slopes of the mountain, provided Thessaloniki with fresh water by an aqueduct whose remains have been partly preserved. By the 15th century the settlement with the monastery was called Kastron Chortiatis and it fell in 1423 under Ottoman rule. In 1912 the Greek town was liberated.
The Chortiatis massacre was a World War IImass 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 on mount Chortiatis, were the two Collaborators and the Chemist was 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 sergeantFriedrich 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 can 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. They 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 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.
