Thessaloniki was a surprise. I hadn’t expected it to have such a vibrant nightlife, so many stylish and busy bars and so much atmosphere. Perhaps, as a waitress told us over cold beers on a warm and sunny April afternoon, it’s because Thessaloniki is a city of students. There are tens of thousands of them in residence.
If I’ll remember anything about our long weekend, it’ll be those bars and the hours spent imbibing. But Thessaloniki is also a city with history and elegance, cars and pollution, graffiti and dereliction, stray cats and dogs, and poverty-stricken citizens who have to rifle through bins to find something they can sell for a euro or two just to make ends meet. They are among the victims of the Greek economic crisis that lingers on, even if it’s disappeared from the British newspapers. But while there are plenty of signs of that crisis around town – the empty shops and creaking infrastructure – there’s clearly plenty of money about. For every empty shop there are plenty of boutiques and stores doing good business, as well as those thriving bars.
We arrived at lunchtime on Good Friday on a BA A320 from Gatwick, stepped into beautiful spring weather, caught a taxi into town and navigated the traffic jams to the bright and comfortable Hotel Excelsior, bang in the heart of the city. Lunch was taken at Zithos, a restaurant in old Ladadika just a short walk away. It’s one of the few districts that avoided destruction in the great fire of 2017. Its old warehouses and brothels, once a vital part of the thriving port, have been converted into bars and eateries, and its narrow cobbled streets are largely free of the traffic that scars the rest of Thessaloniki.
The fire, and the earthquakes that have hit the city over time, mean that much of the architecture is 20th century, with apartment block after apartment block lining the streets – some more attractive than others, some dirty and dilapidated. There are some fine art nouveau and Art Deco buildings and as a whole they give the centre a pleasing symmetry, framing the main Aristotelous Square. The few ancient buildings that survive in the city centre are the churches and Roman ruins.
After lunch we took a walk along the waterfront, which is a nightmare of cars, lorries, buses and fumes. It’s such a missed opportunity. With imagination, the authorities could turn it into a pedestrianised promenade with people-friendly attractions, art and entertainment. But they haven’t and probably won’t because the Greeks love their cars and I imagine any such plan would be met with revolution. So we struggled on along crowded pavements, breathing in the exhaust gases, until we reached the White Tower at a ghastly traffic junction.
It’s Thessaloniki’s star attraction, but I’m not quite sure why. It’s a stubby edifice, much like any medieval tower, and it’s not even white anymore. It was built by the Ottomans in the 15th century and used by them as a prison and place of torture. We went inside and took a walk to the top, which had some excellent views of the seafront and the snow-capped mountains in the far distance. Less successful was the exhibition on the city’s history that filled the floors in-between. Sadly the information boards were mostly in Greek and the audio commentary was so boring that I felt all life had been sucked out of me after 10 minutes of listening to it.
More successful was the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which we visited the next day. It wasn’t the easiest of museums to navigate and the random inclusion of an exhibit on Polish jewellery was a bit of a waste of time, but by and large there was much to learn and enjoy. Thessaloniki and Macedonia have a fascinating history and I particularly appreciated the room on the Roman period. The curators just need to learn to edit it down a bit because there was too much of everything.
After a few beers and an early evening nap, we returned to Ladadika and its popular bars, following the crowds as they went in search of beer and food. We had a bite to eat nearby before settling in to a compact and atmospheric little jazz bar in Ladadika, and got quietly pissed on Kaiser…
