Thessaloniki hands out its best sights for free: eight of its UNESCO churches charge no entry, the Byzantine walls are an open-air balcony, and dinner in Athonos Square runs €8. Three days here cost less than one in Athens.
Greece's largest basilica, rebuilt after the 1917 fire over the Roman baths where Saint Demetrius was killed. Five 7th-century mosaic panels survived the flames, and the crypt below holds the martyr's shrine. Open daily 08:00–22:00.
The 1444 bathhouse built for Sultan Murad II, the oldest Ottoman hamam in Greece, with marble hot rooms and domes punched with star-shaped skylights. It now works as a free exhibition hall on the corner of Egnatia and Aristotelous.
The pink 1870s townhouse where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881, restored room by room with period furniture and family photographs inside the Turkish consulate garden. Admission costs nothing and it opens daily 10:00–17:00.
The 15th-century artillery bastion where Ano Poli's stone lanes meet the ramparts and the whole Thermaic Gulf opens up towards Mount Olympus. Locals buy beers at the kiosk below and sit along the wall until the light goes.
The city's oldest market, an Ottoman-era warren of fishmongers, olive barrels and spice sacks wedged between Egnatia and Ermou. Traders start shouting prices at 07:00: a kilo of feta runs €7–9, a bag of Florina peppers about €2.
A tiled square where copper workshops once stood, now ringed by mezedopoleia with tables under the plane trees. Grilled sardines, gigantes beans and bread land at roughly €8 a head, and a carafe of house wine starts around €4.
A 1969 bakery on Panagias Faneromenis where the phyllo is still stretched by hand every morning before dawn. A slab of semolina-cream or minced-meat bougatsa costs €2.20–3, cut with scissors and dusted with sugar and cinnamon.
The shop that invented trigona Panoramatos in 1960 — horns of crisp syrup-soaked phyllo filled with cold custard. One costs about €2.50 and the queue moves quickly once the evening batch comes out of the kitchen.
The acropolis fortress crowning the Byzantine walls, used as a Greek prison until 1989 and still carrying inmates' graffiti on the cell walls. Entry is €2 and the terrace drops the entire city down to the water in one view.
The mock-pirate boats moored along the pier by the waterfront cross the gulf without an admission charge — you pay only for one drink, roughly €5. Departures run every 30 minutes or so from late morning until midnight.
The rebuilt five-kilometre promenade strung with thirteen themed gardens — roses, sand, sculpture, water — ending at Giorgos Zongolopoulos's steel Umbrellas from 1997. Walking the whole stretch costs nothing at all.
The hillside suburb 11 km east, reached on OASTH bus 58 from Venizelou for a €1.20 flat fare. From the church square at 350 metres the gulf, the city grid and Mount Olympus stack up behind each other on a clear evening.