Thessaloniki stacks its culture vertically: 7th-century mosaics under a rebuilt basilica, a 1444 sultan's bathhouse on the Roman high street, contemporary art in port warehouses. Three days across Byzantine, Ottoman, Sephardic and modern Greece.
Eleven galleries trace the city from early Christian basilicas to the fall of Byzantium, with lifted floor mosaics, gold-thread textiles and a reconstructed catacomb tomb. Open 08:30–15:30 in winter, longer in summer.
Greece's largest basilica, rebuilt after the 1917 fire, keeps five 7th-century mosaic panels of the city's patron saint. Below it the crypt marks the Roman bath where Demetrios was speared. Church open to 20:00.
A converted warehouse on the working port shows MOMus exhibitions alongside rotating works from the 1,275-piece Costakis collection of Russian avant-garde art. Concrete halls, sea light, closed Mondays.
The 1444 bathhouse of Sultan Murad II, the oldest Ottoman hamam in Greece, keeps its stalactite muqarnas domes and traces of painted plaster. Now an exhibition space on Egnatia, above the Roman decumanus.
Gold from the Macedonian tombs of Sindos and Derveni, including the gilded bronze Derveni Krater of about 330 BCE and the carbonised Derveni Papyrus, the oldest surviving book in Europe. Open daily from 08:30.
Two seafront buildings: Arata Isozaki's glass-and-stone M2 and the older M1, home to the State Symphony Orchestra of Thessaloniki and the city's opera productions. Box office opens mid-morning on performance days.
Greece's only state photography museum fills Warehouse A on Pier A, holding major Greek archives and hosting the PhotoBiennale. Prints of Ottoman-era Thessaloniki hang a few metres from the water. Closed Mondays.
The NTNG stages Greek classics and new writing in the Society for Macedonian Studies building, with the Royal Theatre and smaller stages nearby. Curtain is usually 21:00, matinees Sunday afternoon.
The 14th-century monastery survived the Ottoman conquest intact and keeps frescoes, a small library and peacocks in its garden. From the terrace the Byzantine walls drop toward the Trigonion Tower and the gulf.
Eli Modiano's 1922 steel-and-glass hall reopened in 2022 after a decade shuttered, mixing fishmongers and spice stalls with mezedopoleia under one roof. Kapani, the older Ottoman bazaar, fills the alleys just north.
Housed in one of the few Ladino-era buildings to survive the 1917 fire, it tells the story of a city more than half Sephardic until the 1943 deportations, with gravestones from the destroyed necropolis.
Interwar textile warehouses now hold studios, record shops and the densest run of murals in the city, along Syngrou, Ionos Dragoumi and the courtyards between them. Bars here barely stir before 21:00.