Last week I sang the praises of visiting the Greek mainland, and gave a few recommendations of my own favourite places. One of these was Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. Several travel magazines and websites have recently tipped Thessaloniki as a top city break destination for 2023, and I’m not surprised. So here are a few reasons to visit Thessaloniki.
Museums
Thessaloniki has several excellent museums, some big like the Archaeological Museum, and some smaller and specialist, including a radio museum, a children’s museum, and a cinema museum.
We wrote a page all about the Museums of Thessaloniki, featuring twelve of the best, and you can read it here:
Food
We’ve been to the city several times and on our first visit we were immediately struck by the standard of the food, from cheap eats to more high-end places. It reminded us of Barcelona, another great city by the sea. So exceptional is the food that in 2021 UNESCO made it a City of Gastronomy, the only one in Greece. The people in Athens were a bit put out!
Read about it here:
Thessaloniki: City of Gastronomy
Churches
UNESCO has also singled out Thessaloniki’s Byzantine churches and in 1988 made them collectively World Heritage Monuments. In the last newsletter I described my visit to the lovely, tiny church of Ossios David, but there are also huge churches, like Agios Dimitrios, dedicated to the city’s patron saint.
This has mosaics going back to the 5th and 6th centuries. Read about this and Thessaloniki’s other churches - well, some of them - here:
Day Trips
If you are thinking about Thessaloniki as a city break then we’d recommend you make it as long as you can. Stay for a weekend and you’ll scrape the surface and be wanting to go back. Save yourself the extra costs and stay there for a week the first time! As well as being a fantastic city you can also do lots of day trips from there.
Mount Olympus is about a 2 hr 30 mins drive from Thessaloniki. You can also do a boat tour around Mount Athos, the so-called Monks’ Republic. There are also several exceptional archaeological sites not far from the city, including Dion, Pella, and the Royal Tombs at Vergina.
Read our page on the Ten Best Day Trips from Thessaloniki.
On second thoughts, better make that first trip a two-week visit! You can also read an overview of the city on this page:
We’ll be bringing you some more Greek information and inspiration soon.
Mike and Donna