Thessaloniki audiotours

Cassander of Macedon founded Thessaloniki in 315 BC and named it after his wife Thessalonike, who was Alexander the Great's half-sister. The city became the capital of Roman Macedonia in 128 BC, a major hub on the Via Egnatia trade route that connected the Adriatic to Constantinople, and then the Byzantine Empire's second city for nearly a millennium. The Arch of Galerius, erected around 300 AD, still stands in the city centre. The White Tower, a 15th-century Ottoman fortification on the waterfront, is the city's most photographed landmark and houses a permanent exhibition on Thessaloniki's layered history.

The city's Jewish community was one of the most significant in the world for centuries.

In the 1519 Ottoman census, Jews comprised 54 percent of the population, making Thessaloniki the only majority-Jewish city in Europe. The Great Fire of 1917 left 72,000 people homeless and 70 percent of the population unemployed. Then came deportation: of the approximately 45,000 Jews who were sent to Auschwitz in 1943, only four percent survived. The Holocaust memorial near the Aristotelous square carries this history at the centre of the city that built most of its modern identity in the space left behind.