15 UNESCO Byzantine Monuments, the World's Finest Early Byzantine Mosaics, Vergina's Unlooted Royal Macedonian Tombs & Greece's Best Food City
📍 Thessaloniki, Greece📅 3-day itinerary
Greece's second city has the most complex multi-civilisational history in southeastern Europe — the Roman emperor Galerius built his mausoleum here in 300 CE (the Rotunda, whose 4th-5th century mosaics are finer than anything in Ravenna), the Byzantine Empire left 15 UNESCO-listed monuments on the same streets where the Ottoman governors ruled for 480 years (1430-1912), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born here in 1881, the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world (80,000 people, 50% of the city's population in 1900) lived here until the 1943 deportations to Auschwitz, and 60 km west, the unlooted tomb of Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great's father) still holds its gold crown and ivory portraits.
The 300 CE Roman Circular Temple Whose 4th-5th Century Mosaics Were Plastered Over by the Ottomans (Who Converted It to a Mosque in 1590) and Survived 400 Years of Islamic Iconoclasm Under the Plaster — and the 303 CE Triumphal Arch Whose Relief Sculptures Are the Finest Surviving Late Roman Triumphal Carving
The City That Was "La Madre de Israel" — 80,000 Sephardic Jews (Half the Population in 1900) Who Spoke the 15th-Century Spanish of Their 1492 Expulsion From Granada for 450 Years — Until 19 Deportation Trains to Auschwitz in 1943 Killed 96% of Them & The House Where the Founder of Modern Turkey Was Born in 1881
The Vergina Tumulus That the Greek Archaeologist Manolis Andronikos Excavated from the Top Rather Than the Side in 1977 — the Reason No Grave Robber Had Ever Found It — Revealing the Unlooted Tomb of Philip II of Macedon with the Gold Larnax, the Gold Oak Wreath, the Ivory Portrait with the Damaged Right Eye Consistent with Philip's Historical Arrow Wound at Methone