An hour and a half southeast of Paris, about 150 kilometres away, stands a town most tourists skip on the way to somewhere bigger - and that is exactly why Troyes has stayed as it was centuries ago. From the air, the historic core looks like a champagne cork, surrounded by trees and canals, so the locals rightly call it the "Bouchon" - the cork.

This was no ordinary provincial town. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Troyes was the most active centre of trade and finance in Western Europe. Across the Champagne region, six great fairs were held a year, two of them here, and the counts of Champagne invented a system to protect merchants on the roads - a medieval version of a guarantee that the goods would arrive. History here is not decoration, but a foundation: in 1420, it was in Troyes that a treaty was signed handing the French crown to the English king Henry V, and only the intervention of Joan of Arc nine years later returned the crown to the French heir to the throne.

After a great fire in 1524 that destroyed a quarter of the town, the rebuilding came with more durable materials - brick and lime - so today Troyes has perhaps the largest collection of timber-framed houses in all of France, mixed with Renaissance palaces. The most photographed alley, the Ruelle des Chats (Alley of the Cats), is so narrow that the neighbouring rooftops almost touch, with 13th-century cobblestones underfoot. The Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, though unfinished with a single tower, holds 1,500 square metres of stained glass from the 13th to the 17th century.

And here is the detail that rarely appears in the tourist guides: this quiet medieval town gave birth to the brands Lacoste, Dim and Petit-Bateau, and today is one of the largest outlet centres in France. The textile tradition that made it rich in the Middle Ages still works, only now it sells at a discount. For the Balkan traveller fleeing overcrowded metropolises, Troyes is exactly what we mean when we say "authentic" - a town that does not play to the cameras, because it never had any need to reinvent itself.