Greece's second city and first table — Byzantine walls, a refugee kitchen reborn, and sunset over the Thermaic Gulf
Thessaloniki is the second city of Greece and arguably its first table — locals will tell you with quiet conviction that Greek food is actually Thessalonian food, a claim backed by the 1923 population exchange that transformed what Greeks ate. When the Lausanne Convention expelled 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks from Turkey in 1923, approximately 100,000 refugees arrived in Thessaloniki — Pontic Greeks from Trebizond, Anatolian Greeks from Smyrna, and Istanbul Greeks — bringing with them the spice tradition, stuffed pastries, sesame-coated simit (which Thessaloniki calls koulouri), and the meze t…
Thessaloniki was founded by Cassander of Macedon in 315 BC and named for his wife Thessalonica, half-sister of Alexander the Great. Its position at the head of the Thermaic Gulf and the start of the Via Egnatia — the Roman road from the Adriatic to Byzantium — made it the second city of the Byzantine Empire for 1,000 years. Saint Paul visited twice (50 and 55 AD); the Epistles to the Thessalonians in the New Testament are addressed to its Christian community, one of the first established outside Judea. The brothers Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet (ancestor of Cyrillic…