Shopping in Thessaloniki runs along a compact grid of commercial streets, covered market halls, and design districts set within a short walk of the seafront. The wide avenue of Tsimiski carries the fashion chains, the halls of Modiano and Kapani sell food and spices, and the lanes of Valaoritou and Ladadika hold independent design shops. … Read more
Ottoman Thessaloniki is the layer of the city that grew across nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, and it survives as a thread of baths, mosques, markets, and fountains woven through the Roman and Byzantine streets. The bathhouse on Egnatia, the covered cloth hall behind the shops, the striped minaret above the poorhouse, and the … Read more
Dion was the sacred city of the ancient Macedonians, the place where their kings worshipped Olympian Zeus at the foot of his mountain. It lies roughly eighty-five kilometres southwest of Thessaloniki, a walled town of temples, theatres, and paved streets set among the springs below Mount Olympus. Here the Macedonian rulers sacrificed before war, and … Read more
Veria sits on the foothills of Mount Vermio, roughly seventy kilometres west-southwest of Thessaloniki, close enough for an easy day out and rich enough to fill one. The town gathered its fame from stone and faith: the Bema where the Apostle Paul preached, the Barbouta Jewish quarter beside the Tripotamos, and the ranks of Byzantine … Read more
The walls of Thessaloniki are the great land and sea fortifications that ringed the Byzantine city, a circuit of close to four kilometres of stone and brick. They stand in their present form from the late fourth to the middle of the fifth century, raised on the line of an earlier late-Roman wall. The defence … Read more
Thessaloniki carries three thousand years of layered history, and its museums hold the proof in gold, mosaic, photograph, and film. The Archaeological Museum guards the Derveni Krater and the gold of the Macedonian kings, the Museum of Byzantine Culture reads the city’s long medieval prime, and the White Tower turns its own Ottoman shell into … Read more
Thessaloniki and Athens are the two great cities of the Greek mainland, and a traveller planning a trip often has to choose between them or split the days across both. Athens carries the weight of the classical world, its skyline crowned by the Acropolis and its museums holding the record of ancient Greece. Thessaloniki runs … Read more
Thessaloniki drinks more coffee, more slowly, than almost any city in Greece. The café is the default meeting ground here, a place where students, workers, and pensioners settle for hours over a single tall glass of iced espresso. The city gave the world the frappé, took the freddo espresso to heart, and still brews Greek … Read more
Thessaloniki beaches are not found on the city waterfront. The promenade that runs along the Thermaic Gulf is a place to walk, cycle, and watch the sunset. The sea in front of the city holds no organised swimming beach, and it carries the pollution of a working port and a ring of river mouths. The … Read more
The Eptapyrgio is the acropolis fortress that crowns the Upper Town of Thessaloniki, a citadel of ten towers set into the north-eastern corner of the ancient walls about two hundred metres above the sea. Its Byzantine masonry and its Ottoman gate carry the name Yedi Kule, the seven towers, and its long service as a … Read more