🇬🇷 Greece · Mainland Greece
Thessaloniki is the great city of northern Greece, the 'second capital' that for centuries rivalled Constantinople and that many now consider the most vital and enjoyable in the country. It has no Acropolis to sum it up in a single postcard: its charm is more diffuse and deeper, made of layers of history overlapping everywhere. On a single walk you go from a Roman arch to a Byzantine church, from a medieval wall to an Ottoman tower, from a synagogue to a spice market, all bathed in the light of the Thermaic Gulf and in the young energy its huge universities give it.
It is, above all, a city to live rather than to tick monuments off a list. Thessaloniki has a reputation as the food capital of Greece: its tavernas (ouzeri, mezedopoleia), its markets, its freshly baked bougatsa, the cooking with Asia Minor roots brought by the refugees of 1922 and a life of cafés and bars that never stops. The seafront promenade (the Nea Paralia), with the White Tower as its emblem, is the social heart of the city, where locals and visitors walk, cycle and watch the sun set over the sea, with Mount Olympus outlined in the distance on clear days.
This guide covers Thessaloniki with a practical eye and also with the soberness its history demands. Because this was one of the great Jewish cities in the world — the 'Jerusalem of the Balkans' — a Sephardic community that arrived after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, came to be the majority in the city and was almost entirely exterminated at Auschwitz in 1943. Getting to know Thessaloniki means looking into that multiple and not always easy past: the Roman Via Egnatia, the Byzantine golden age, four Ottoman centuries, the great fire of 1917, the population exchange of 1923 and the memory of a community that disappeared.
Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC by Cassander, king of Macedon, who named it after his wife Thessalonike, half-sister of Alexander the Great. Set at a strategic crossroads, under Rome it became the capital of the province of Macedonia and a great city on the Via Egnatia, the road linking the Adriatic with Byzantium; from that imperial period date the Rotunda and the Arch of Galerius. In the Byzantine Empire it was the second city after Constantinople, protected by its patron Saint Demetrius and adorned with churches and mosaics that are today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1430 it fell under Ottoman rule, which lasted almost five centuries, and in that period the city took in thousands of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, who came to be the majority community and gave it a uniquely cosmopolitan character. In 1912 it was incorporated into Greece. The 20th century branded it: the great fire of 1917 razed the centre, the population exchange of 1923 brought thousands of Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and the Nazi occupation deported and exterminated at Auschwitz, in 1943, almost the whole Jewish community. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land heart of Greece: the oracle of Delphi and the Olympia of the Games, the suspended monasteries of Meteora, Venetian Nafplio that was the first capital of the modern state, and the Macedonia of Alexander with Thessaloniki, the great Sephardic metropolis wiped out in 1943.
Read the history of Mainland Greece →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Thessaloniki was born of ambition and filial love at a decisive moment in Greek history. In 315 BC, a few years after the death of Alexander the Great and in the middle of his generals' struggle to divide the empire, the king of Macedon Cassander founded a new city by bringing together the inhabitants of some twenty small settlements around the Thermaic Gulf, among them ancient Therma. He named it Thessalonike in honour of his wife, who in turn was the half-sister of Alexander the Great: her name means 'victory of Thessaly', recalling a military triumph of her father, Philip II. So the city was tied from its first day to the great Macedonian dynasty.
Its location could not have been better: a sheltered natural harbour at the head of the gulf, at the point where the overland routes of the Balkans meet the Aegean. When Rome conquered Macedonia in the 2nd century BC, Thessaloniki became the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia and a key piece of the empire, because through it ran the Via Egnatia, the great road that crossed the Balkans linking the Adriatic with Byzantium (the future Constantinople) and, through it, with Rome and with the East. That commercial and military axis made the city a prosperous and cosmopolitan crossroads.
From late Roman times comes its first great monumental ensemble, linked to the emperor Galerius, who around AD 300 chose it as one of his residences and had a vast palace complex built. From it survive the Arch of Galerius (the Kamara), raised to celebrate his victories over the Persians, and the imposing Rotunda, a colossal domed circular building that would be reused over the centuries. It was also under Roman rule that the apostle Paul preached in the city and wrote his Epistles to the Thessalonians, sowing the seeds of a Christianity that would shape its future.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the Byzantine Empire, Thessaloniki reached its greatest splendour. For more than a millennium it was the second city of the Byzantine world, behind only Constantinople itself, a great commercial, military, intellectual and religious centre, ringed by powerful walls and turned towards Aegean trade. Its annual Saint Demetrius fair drew merchants from across the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
The city became inseparably linked to the figure of its patron, Saint Demetrius (Agios Dimitrios), a Christian martyr who, by tradition, was executed in the time of Galerius and to whom the people of Thessaloniki attributed, over the centuries, the miraculous protection of the city against sieges and disasters. Over the site of his martyrdom was raised the great basilica that bears his name, one of the most venerated churches in Eastern Christianity.
From that Byzantine flowering comes Thessaloniki's greatest treasure: its extraordinary group of early Christian and Byzantine churches, built between the 4th and 15th centuries, which in 1988 were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The mosaics of the Rotunda, of Saint Demetrius and of the church of Osios David are among the masterpieces of early Christian art, and churches such as Hagia Sophia, Panagia Chalkeon or the Holy Apostles mark out the evolution of Byzantine architecture. The city was also the birthplace of figures such as the brothers Cyril and Methodius, the 'apostles of the Slavs', who from here took Christianity and a new alphabet to the Slavic peoples. After brilliant centuries — interrupted by tragic episodes such as the Norman sack of 1185 — Byzantine Thessaloniki came to an end in 1430, when it was conquered by the Ottomans.
In 1430 Thessaloniki came under Ottoman rule, and so it would remain for almost five centuries, until 1912. The Turks made it one of the great cities of the empire, called it Selanik, turned many of its churches into mosques (they added to the Rotunda the minaret that still stands today) and gave it the character of a deeply multicultural city, where Muslims, Orthodox Christians and a community that would end up defining its identity lived side by side: the Sephardic Jews.
The decisive event was the arrival, from 1492, of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs, later joined by Sephardim from Portugal and Italy. The Ottoman Empire took them in, and many found a new homeland in Thessaloniki. They brought their language — Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, an old Castilian they would preserve for centuries — their trades, their culture and a remarkable commercial drive. The community grew until it became the majority in the city: for much of the Ottoman period, Thessaloniki was one of the very few cities in the world with a Jewish majority, with dozens of synagogues, schools, printing presses and an extremely rich intellectual life. It was said the port closed on Saturdays, in respect for the Sabbath. Hence it was known as the 'Jerusalem of the Balkans' or 'the Mother of Israel'.
That mosaic of peoples lived together, with tensions and inequalities, until the early 20th century. In 1912, during the First Balkan War, Thessaloniki was taken by the Greek army and incorporated into the Kingdom of Greece, ending the long Ottoman rule and opening a new, far more turbulent chapter in the city's history.
The 20th century completely transformed the face and the make-up of Thessaloniki in just a few decades. The first blow was material: in August 1917, with the city serving as a base for the Allied armies during the First World War, a devastating fire spread over some thirty-two hours and razed much of the historic centre. The fire destroyed some 9,500 homes and left more than 70,000 people homeless, many of them from the Jewish community, whose neighbourhoods, synagogues, schools and shops were reduced to ashes. Much of the medieval Ottoman town and of the Jewish city disappeared forever.
The Greek authorities took advantage of the disaster to rebuild the centre with a modern urban plan, commissioned from the French architect Ernest Hébrard, who designed the broad avenues and the monumental Aristotelous square opening onto the sea that we know today. But the rebuilding also meant that many of those affected, especially Jews, could not recover their property and were pushed to emigrate or to the outskirts.
The second great change was demographic. The Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor led to the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which set up a forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey based on religion: the Muslims of Greece were to go to Turkey, and the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia to Greece. As a result, the Muslim population of Thessaloniki left the city, while Greek refugees from Asia Minor — from Smyrna, Constantinople, Pontus — arrived in great numbers, settling in new neighbourhoods and bringing their culture, their music and a cuisine that still defines Thessalonian food today. That exchange Hellenised the city and, for the first time in centuries, the Jews became a minority, outnumbered by the newly arrived Christians.
The most tragic chapter in the history of Thessaloniki came during the Second World War. In April 1941 the city was occupied by Nazi Germany, and the machinery of the Holocaust fell upon its Jewish community — which still numbered some 50,000 people, the vast majority descendants of those Sephardim who had arrived from Spain four and a half centuries earlier.
The persecution was staged and methodical. In July 1942 thousands of Jewish men were subjected to forced labour and public humiliation. Shortly afterwards the occupying authorities destroyed the city's enormous Jewish cemetery, one of the largest in Europe, with hundreds of thousands of graves, whose headstones were reused as building material. Ghettos and the yellow star were imposed. And between 15 March and August 1943, in successive convoys leaving Thessaloniki station, practically the whole Jewish community of the city was deported in freight trains to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
The figures are appalling: on the order of 46,000 to 49,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were sent to Auschwitz, and the vast majority were murdered, a great many of them in the gas chambers on arrival. It was one of the most complete destructions of an entire community anywhere in Europe: of that centuries-old Jewish Thessaloniki, the 'Jerusalem of the Balkans', only a small fraction survived. With it disappeared a language — the Ladino spoken in the city — a heritage and a way of life that cannot be replaced.
Today Thessaloniki preserves that memory soberly. The Jewish Museum documents the history and the annihilation of the community; the Holocaust Memorial in Eleftherias square — the very place where Jewish men were publicly humiliated in 1942 — commemorates the victims; and at the Aristotle University, built partly over the old Jewish cemetery, memorial plaques have been placed. Acknowledging that absence is inseparable from understanding the city.
From the postwar years to today, Thessaloniki rebuilt itself as a large modern Greek city, the country's second, without giving up the historical density that sets it apart. The city grew with industry and the port, received waves of internal migration and established itself as a major university hub: the Aristotle University, the largest in Greece and the Balkans, gives the city a youthful energy you notice in its cafés, its bars, its music and its cultural life, with film and food festivals of international standing.
In recent decades, Thessaloniki has been revaluing its many layers and putting them in dialogue: the restored Roman and Byzantine monuments, the renewed Nea Paralia seafront, historic markets such as Modiano brought back to life, and growing attention to the Jewish and Ottoman memory that was silenced for a long time. The city today claims with pride its status as a melting pot of cultures.
The most recent and long-awaited milestone came at the end of 2024, when the city's metro finally opened, after decades of works delayed by the constant archaeological finds underground. That metro, with stations displaying in situ the remains of the ancient city found while digging, sums up what Thessaloniki is: a 21st-century city that walks literally on twenty-three centuries of history, and that has learned to show them rather than hide them.