Three days in Thessaloniki: Byzantine churches wedged into an interwar grid

The waterfront on the first evening, the emperor's quarter and the upper town on the full day, and the city's great basilica before the train.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Thessaloniki
Places
7 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC and has been a capital, a second city or a frontier town ever since. Rome ran the eastern empire from here for a while, Byzantium treated it as second only to Constantinople, the Ottomans held it for close to five centuries, and for much of that time it was a majority Jewish city known across the region as the Jerusalem of the Balkans.

Almost none of that survives as streetscape, because in August 1917 a fire that started in a house burned out the whole centre. What was rebuilt is a grid of interwar apartment blocks with a Roman rotunda, a 4th century arch and a dozen Byzantine churches embedded in it like fossils. You come round a corner from a phone shop and there is a 5th century basilica.

It is also the best place to eat in Greece, has a student population that fills the bars every night of the week, and is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour. Two nights is short, and still enough for the essential things.

Highlights

  • A Roman rotunda built as an imperial mausoleum, later a church, later a mosque, with its minaret still standing outside
  • The upper town, which the 1917 fire never reached, and the walls above it at sunset
  • Seventh century mosaics in the basilica of the city's patron saint, saved from a fire that gutted the building around them
  • The long car free waterfront from the port to the White Tower, which is where the whole city walks in the evening

Where to stay

Thessaloniki, two nights

The city sits on a slope facing a bay, which makes orientation easy: the sea is downhill and the walls are uphill, and Egnatia, the main road across the middle, follows the line of the Roman highway that ran from the Adriatic to Constantinople.

Nothing here is arranged for visitors. The monuments sit where they always were, in among car parks, blocks of flats and cafes, and half of them are free to walk into. That is a large part of the pleasure: you are not touring a preserved centre, you are in a working Greek city that happens to have a Roman emperor's palace under one of its squares.

Day by day

Day 1 in Thessaloniki

The waterfront, from the square to the tower

Start at the port end and walk east. The front was rebuilt as a continuous car free promenade a decade or so ago and it is the best thing the city has done for itself in years: several kilometres of paving, gardens and benches with the bay on one side and Mount Olympus visible across the water on a clear day.

It ends at the tower that appears on every postcard of the city. Go up it while the light is going; the exhibits inside are thin, but the roof is the only high point in the centre.

  1. 17:00

    Eleftherias Square

    Architecture

    An unremarkable square with car parking on it and a memorial at one edge. In July 1942 the German occupiers assembled every Jewish man in the city here for a day of forced humiliation in the sun; the deportations to Auschwitz began the following spring, and of a community of fifty five thousand around two thousand survived.

  2. 18:15

    White Tower

    Culture

    Thirty four metres of Ottoman masonry on the corner of the old sea walls, used as a garrison post and then as a prison, which earned it a much darker name before it was whitewashed at the end of the nineteenth century. Six floors of city history spiral up inside it, all captioned in Greek, with an audio guide in English and a view over the bay at the top.

  3. 20:30

    Dinner in Ladadika

    Eat

    The old oil merchants' warehouses behind the port survived the fire and are now three streets of tavernas and bars. Touristy by local standards, which still means better than most cities manage.

With more time: The umbrella sculpture on the front, halfway between the port and the tower, is where the city takes its photographs at sunset. Further east the promenade runs on through a series of themed gardens as far as the concert hall, and the whole strip is busiest around ten at night.

Day 2 in Thessaloniki

Galerius's quarter, then the upper town

Around 300 AD the emperor Galerius built himself a capital here: a palace by the sea, a ceremonial road running uphill from it, a triumphal arch across that road, and a domed rotunda at the top. Three of the four are still standing, in a straight line, five minutes apart, with modern Thessaloniki built around them.

Take the morning over that, eat in one of the covered markets, and spend the afternoon climbing. Ano Poli, the upper town, is the quarter the 1917 fire never reached, so it still has wooden Ottoman houses, lanes too narrow for cars and Byzantine churches with their frescoes intact.

The walls at the top are where to be an hour before sunset, looking down the slope over the whole city to the bay.

  1. 09:30

    Rotunda

    Religious

    A cylinder of Roman brick twenty four metres across, its dome thirty metres up, built as part of Galerius's complex and roughly contemporary with the Pantheon. It became a church, then a mosque in 1591, and the minaret from that period still stands outside, the only one left in the city. An earthquake took the dome in 1978 and it reopened in 1998.

  2. 10:45

    Arch of Galerius

    Historic

    Five minutes downhill from the rotunda, straddling the pavement where it once straddled the imperial road. Dedicated in 303 AD for a victory over the Persians, and the carved panels running up the piers are a comic strip of that campaign, worn but readable.

  3. 13:00

    Lunch at Kapani or Modiano

    Eat

    The two covered markets are ten minutes west and full of small places serving lunch to the traders. Kapani is the older, rougher and better one; Modiano was restored a few years ago and is now more of a food hall.

  4. 16:30

    Heptapyrgion

    Historic

    The Ottoman fort at the top of the acropolis, converted by the Greek state into a prison that only closed in 1989 and was notorious throughout that time. The courtyard is open, the exhibition inside is small, and the ground outside the gate gives you the whole city at once.

With more time: Come back down through the lanes rather than on the bus. Ano Poli holds half a dozen small Byzantine churches with fourteenth century wall paintings, most of them free and often locked outside morning hours, and a scattering of tavernas with terraces looking straight down over the bay, which are the best dinner in the city on a warm evening.

Day 3 in Thessaloniki

The basilica and the forum, then out

Two things left, both in the centre and both a short walk from anywhere you are likely to have slept. Do them in the morning and you can still take an afternoon train.

The basilica is the city's own church, built over the Roman bath where its patron saint was held and killed, and the crypt underneath is the part most visitors miss.

  1. 09:00

    Saint Demetrios

    Religious

    A Roman officer named Demetrius was imprisoned and killed here in 303 AD, and the basilica over the spot went up in the 7th century. Fire gutted it in 1917 and rebuilding took fifty years, but the mosaics on the west wall and along the nave came through the heat, which is why the panels of the saint standing beside the officials and children who paid for them are still here. Go down to the crypt.

  2. 10:30

    Roman Forum

    Historic

    Five minutes downhill, the excavated centre of the Roman city, with the theatre, the paved square and a stretch of the cryptoporticus visible from the street above. The museum built underneath it explains what you are looking at and is usually empty.

  3. 14:00

    Train or bus out

    Travel

    The railway station is at the west end of the centre, one metro stop or twenty minutes' walk. Airport buses leave from the front and from the station and take about forty five minutes in traffic.

With more time: With a later departure, the two big museums sit side by side east of the tower, one covering the Macedonian kingdom and the Roman city and the other early Christian and Byzantine life, and either is a comfortable ninety minutes. A museum of the city's Jewish history sits closer in, a few streets back from the front.

Before you go

Where to stay

The grid between Egnatia and the sea is the practical choice: five minutes from the waterfront, ten from the Roman monuments, and surrounded by places to eat. Ladadika, the surviving warehouse quarter near the port, is the prettiest part of it and the loudest at night.

The upper town, Ano Poli, is quieter, older and much better looking, with the trade off that you are walking uphill at the end of every evening. The streets around the railway station are cheap and not somewhere to arrive late.

Getting around

You can walk everything here except the upper town, and even that is only twenty five minutes uphill from the centre. Buses climb it constantly if you would rather not.

The metro is one line across the city and the fastest way in from the railway station. Its stations were dug through the middle of the ancient city, which held the project up for years; at Venizelou they gave in and displayed the Roman road and the shops along it inside the station, which is worth stopping for even if you are not catching a train.

Buy bus tickets before boarding where you can and keep coins for the machines. Watch pockets on crowded buses at rush hour, which is the one petty crime worth thinking about here.

Getting there

Trains from Athens run several times a day and currently take around five hours, after flooding wrecked part of the line in 2023. Repairs are under way and the timing is worth checking rather than assuming, since it has been changing.

The airport is at Macedonia, south east of the city, with a bus into the centre and plenty of domestic and European flights. It is also the sensible gateway for Chalkidiki and the north.

Eating

This is the argument Thessalonians will always win against Athens. The cooking here absorbed Anatolian, Sephardic and Balkan habits and never gave them back: peppers, cumin, walnuts, filo, yoghurt, things baked in ovens rather than grilled.

Eat where the students eat, in the streets around the two covered markets, Kapani and Modiano. Order mezedes and let them keep coming. Bougatsa, custard or cheese in filo, is breakfast and every bakery will argue that its own is the correct one.

The city drinks late. Bars fill after eleven, and a table at nine will still be your own.

When to come

May, June, September and October are the best months. Winter here is genuinely cold by Greek standards and often wet, which matters more than it does further south because so much of the pleasure is outdoors on the front.

August empties out: many restaurants close for the month while the city goes to Chalkidiki, and it is hot and humid. Come in the term time if you want the city at full volume.

Thessaloniki does not present itself. There is no preserved old town, no set piece view arranged for the camera, and the monuments are scattered through a city that carries on around them without much ceremony.

That is exactly why two nights here feel like more. You spend them walking a normal Greek city and keep tripping over three thousand years of it.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Thessaloniki worth visiting instead of Athens?
As well as, rather than instead of. Athens has the classical sites and nothing here competes with them. Thessaloniki has the Roman and Byzantine layers, far better food, and a centre you can walk in an afternoon, and it is a much easier city to spend an evening in. Five hours apart by train, so plenty of people do both.
Are three days enough?
Enough for the monuments and the food, yes. Two nights covers the Roman quarter, the upper town, the basilica and the waterfront without hurrying. A third night lets you add the museums properly, or a day out to the royal Macedonian tombs at Vergina, a little over an hour away and one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the country.
How do I get around?
On foot, mostly. The historic centre is compact and flat until you start climbing to the upper town. The single metro line is quick from the railway station into the centre, buses cover the hills, and the cultural line bus does a loop past most of the major sights with commentary if you would rather be driven.
What should I eat?
Mezedes, ordered several at a time and shared, at any of the small places around the markets. Bougatsa for breakfast, from a bakery that makes it fresh. Anything with peppers, walnuts or cumin in it, which is the Anatolian half of the city's cooking. Order less than feels right the first time.
Can I change the order of the days?
Yes. The only sequence worth keeping is the second day, where the rotunda, the arch and the climb to the walls run uphill in one line and make sense in that order. Copy the three days into your own trip and shuffle the rest around your arrival time.