A Thessaloniki city tour works on foot, and it works in one long day. The old town sits on a slope above the sea, so the honest version of the route runs downhill: start at the walls, finish at the water. What follows is that route, with the timings that actually apply rather than the ones on the museum signs.
Start high: the Byzantine walls and Ano Poli
Take a taxi or the 23 bus up to Eptapyrgio. From there the city lies below you in one piece, port to airport, and you understand the geography in about 30 seconds.
Ano Poli, the upper town, is the district the great fire of 1917 never reached. Ottoman-era timber houses with jettied upper floors, lanes too narrow for a car, laundry across the street. Allow an hour of unhurried wandering. The two churches worth finding here, Osios David tucked into a courtyard you will walk past twice and Agios Nikolaos Orfanos further down the slope, hold mosaics and frescoes from the 5th and 14th centuries respectively, and both keep short opening hours that are not reliably observed, so treat an open door as luck rather than as a plan.
Down to the Rotunda
The Rotunda was built around 306 AD, probably as a mausoleum for Galerius, and has since been a church, a mosque and a museum. It is a cylinder 24 metres across with walls 6 metres thick, which is why it survived the earthquakes that flattened everything around it. The minaret outside is the only one left standing in the city.
Twenty minutes gets you round it. The gold mosaic fragments in the dome are worth standing still for.
The Roman forum and Aristotelous
Downhill from the Rotunda is the Ancient Agora, excavated only after a car park project hit it in 1966. The odeon and the cryptoporticus are open to the street, and you can walk the site in half an hour without paying anything.
From there it is five minutes to Aristotelous Square, the enormous Beaux-Arts space Ernest Hebrard designed after the fire. Hebrard was handed a burnt city and rebuilt its whole centre on a formal grid running down to the sea, refusing to reinstate the tangled Ottoman street plan underneath, which is exactly why the modern centre looks nothing like the old town you were walking through an hour earlier.
Modiano and Kapani: eat here
The two central markets sit either side of Ermou. Kapani is the older and messier one, open since Ottoman times, still selling fish, meat and cheese to people who cook. Modiano, the 1922 covered hall, reopened in 2022 after a long restoration and now leans toward small plates and wine.
Have lunch at a counter in one of them. Order bougatsa somewhere else in the morning instead, it is a breakfast thing and the city takes it seriously.
Finish at the water
The White Tower is the obvious end point, and the climb up its spiral ramp gives you the bay. Then walk east along the New Waterfront, a 5km pedestrian promenade divided into themed gardens, ending at the Umbrellas sculpture. Do this after 7pm. The whole city does.
Practical notes
- Distances are short. Ano Poli to the White Tower is 35 minutes downhill, considerably longer the other way.
- The metro opened in 2024 after decades of archaeology delays and covers the main axis, though not the upper town.
- September is trade fair season. Hotel rooms vanish and prices move.
- Most archaeological sites shut by 3pm out of season. Plan the indoor parts for the morning.
One thing this page is not
It is not an offer of company in Thessaloniki. This agency arranges bookings in Athens and Mykonos only, and nowhere else in Greece. Nobody works on our behalf in the north, and there is no arrangement to be made there. If your trip also takes in the capital, the Athens page is the relevant one.
