Art And Culture in Thessaloniki

The cultural case for Thessaloniki begins with the fact that this is not Athens. Classical Greece is the south; here it was Macedonia — another kingdom, another dynasty, another capital. At Vergina, an hour away, archaeologists opened the royal necropolis of Aigai and found the main tomb undisturbed: a golden larnax with the sixteen-rayed star, the armour, a wreath of oak leaves. The museum sits inside the burial mound itself, kept dim, so the objects stand where they lay for twenty-three centuries. Dion, at the foot of Olympus, explains the other half of the story: here the Macedonian kings sacrificed to Zeus before campaigns, and from here Alexander set out east.

The second great thread is Christian. The apostle Paul preached at Veria, where the steps of the Bema mark the spot, and to this city he addressed the letters to the Thessalonians, among the earliest texts of the New Testament. The Byzantine inheritance amounts to fifteen UNESCO monuments: the Rotunda with its mosaics, the church of Saint Demetrios above its crypt, the chapels of the Upper Town. Meteora carries the line further in its own way — fourteenth-century monasteries on rock pillars, where icon painting and manuscript work went on in near isolation.

City formats hold it all together. Walking tours tie the archaeological museum to the streets, where the Roman forum opens straight onto the market stalls. Food routes read the culture through the cooking of the refugees from Asia Minor who remade the city in the 1920s. And a self-guided hunt through the centre suits anyone who would rather work it out alone, without a guide or a timetable.