Thessaloniki Is the Greek City That Never Bothered Chasing Santorini's Crowd

Greece's second city has never much bothered competing with Athens for antiquity tourism or Santorini for the postcard shot, and that indifference is precisely what makes Thessaloniki worth the detour. A port city on the Thermaic Gulf with a history stretching back to 315 BC, it carries its Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Sephardic Jewish layers more visibly, and more unselfconsciously, than almost anywhere else in Greece.

A city rebuilt after fire, on purpose

A large part of Thessaloniki's present layout dates to a single catastrophe: the Great Fire of 1917 destroyed much of the old city centre, and the Greek government brought in French architect and archaeologist Ernest Hébrard to redesign it from scratch. His plan gave the city its wide boulevards and its formal Aristotelous Square opening onto the waterfront, and, indirectly, the chance to excavate and preserve Roman-era ruins that a denser, unplanned rebuild would likely have buried for good.

The tower that outlasted an empire

The White Tower, Thessaloniki's best-known landmark, was built by the Ottomans on the site of an earlier Byzantine fortification and originally served as a garrison and prison before being whitewashed and repurposed as a civic monument in the early 20th century. It now houses a museum on the city's history and anchors a waterfront promenade running for several kilometres along the gulf.

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A Jewish history the city has only recently begun to reckon with

Before the Second World War, Thessaloniki held one of Europe's largest Sephardic Jewish communities, descendants of families expelled from Spain in 1492, and was known for a time as a city where Ladino was spoken as widely as Greek. The Holocaust destroyed that community almost entirely; the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and a small number of surviving synagogues are now among the only physical traces of a history that shaped the city's commerce, cuisine and street life for over four centuries.

What actually fills a weekend here

Ano Poli, the upper town, escaped both the 1917 fire and much of the postwar redevelopment below it, and its steep lanes of Ottoman-era wooden houses and Byzantine walls give the clearest sense of the pre-modern city still standing. Lower down, the Rotunda of Galerius, a fourth-century Roman monument later converted into a church and then a mosque, sits a short walk from the university district, home to Aristotle University, the largest in Greece, whose student population keeps the city's bar and café culture running well past what its size might suggest, including the frappé, said to have been invented here by accident in 1957.

Traveller tips

• Thessaloniki's airport, Makedonia, connects directly to several European cities, making it a workable alternative arrival point to Athens for a northern Greece trip.
• The waterfront promenade and Ano Poli are both very walkable; a rental car is more useful for day trips to nearby Halkidiki than for the city itself.
• Bougatsa, a custard or cheese-filled pastry, is considered a Thessaloniki speciality distinct from the Athens version and is best eaten fresh in the morning.
• The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and the Rotunda both keep limited hours on certain days; check ahead before building a tight itinerary around them.