Florina peppers

You hear “Florini peppers” everywhere and they mean the red, long, narrow and thick peppers, which are sold in all the country’s street markets and greengrocers. In the 1920s, an Agricultural and Livestock Station and Agricultural Improvement Station operated in Florina, with Ioannis Kontopoulos as agronomist.
Kontopoulos was a gifted research agronomist who improved the old red pepper variety. All the villagers of the prefecture of Florina took seed from the nursery and cultivated this red Kontopoulos pepper, which at the time had no special name. The peppers did not go beyond the boundaries of the prefecture, because at that time the fruit and vegetable trade were done at the local level. But later, after 1950, the big grocers of Florina went by train and in small trucks to the villages of Thessaloniki and bought early horticultural products. Towards the end of the summer, they loaded late vegetables from Florina and sold them in Thessaloniki. Then the people of Thessaloniki got to know this variety of pepper and because it came from Florina, they were called “Peppers of Florina”.
In recent years, however, the seed migrated and found fertile lands in other areas of northern Greece. However, the name, ” Peppers of Florina”, remained to remind of its original place of origin, Florina.

SOURCE:
1)https://newstube.gr/lifestyle/syntages-fagiton-kai-glykon/giati-oi-dikes-mas-piperies-onomazontai-piperies-florinis

2)Floriniotika.gr/January 05, 2019/ The boucovo and the peppers of Florina/Dimitris Mekasis