Few cities stack 2,300 years this densely: a Macedonian foundation of 315 BCE, a Roman tetrarchic capital, the Byzantine Empire's second city, four centuries of Ottoman rule, and the Sephardic Salonica erased in 1943. This route follows all of it on foot.
Seven galleries run from Neolithic Macedonia to Roman Thessaloniki: the gilded Derveni Krater with its dancing Dionysos, gold myrtle wreaths, and finds from the Sindos necropolis. Open 08:00–20:00 April–October.
The 2nd-century CE forum lies two levels below street grade, with a 400-seat odeon, double-storey cryptoporticus and the imperial mint. The underground museum displays shop inscriptions and forum sculpture found in situ.
Greece's largest basilica, rebuilt after the 1917 fire, retains five 7th-century mosaic panels of the city's patron flanking the apse. The crypt below is the Roman bath complex where Dimitrios was speared in 306 CE.
Ten towers ring the acropolis citadel built into the 4th-century land walls. It served as Thessaloniki's central prison until 1989, and inmate graffiti survives on the cell walls of the Ottoman-era blocks.
Eleven chronological rooms cover the 4th to 15th centuries: reconstructed catacomb frescoes, excavated early Christian tombs from the city's cemeteries, silk textiles, seals and coins. The 1993 building won the Council of Europe Museum Prize.
The three-storey pink konak where Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881, restored as an Ottoman family house with his cradle, uniforms and family photographs. It stands inside the Turkish consulate compound on Apostolou Pavlou.
Set in the 1893 neoclassical building that served as the Greek consulate under Ottoman rule, it documents the 1870–1912 struggle for Macedonia, including the office where consul Lambros Koromilas ran the partisan network.
Housed in one of the few buildings to survive the 1917 fire, it charts a city that was majority Sephardic for 400 years until 1943, when some 96% of 50,000 Jews were deported. Salvaged tombstones from the razed necropolis fill the courtyard.
Two tiny UNESCO churches in Ano Poli: Osios David hides a 5th-century apse mosaic of a beardless Christ, plastered over in Ottoman times and rediscovered in 1921; Agios Nikolaos Orfanos keeps a complete 14th-century fresco cycle.
Eli Modiano's 1922 glass-roofed hall reopened in 2022 after a decade of closure, standing beside the Bezesteni — the late 15th-century Ottoman domed cloth bazaar, still trading gold and haberdashery under six lead cupolas.
Bey Hamam of 1444 is Greece's oldest Ottoman bath, with marble hot rooms and star-pierced domes half-sunk below Egnatia's modern pavement. Hamza Bey Mosque of 1467, long the Alkazar cinema, reopened after restoration two blocks west.
The avenue south of the centre preserves the belle-époque villas of Salonica's Jewish and Levantine merchant families: Casa Bianca of 1911, now the Municipal Art Gallery, plus Villa Mordoch, Villa Allatini and Villa Kapandji.