Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki is a port city in northern Greece, at the head of the Thermaic Gulf on the Aegean Sea. King Cassander of Macedon named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great.

Cassander founded the city in 315 BC by joining older villages around the gulf, and under Rome it grew on the Via Egnatia, the road from the Adriatic to Byzantium. Around AD 300 the emperor Galerius built a palace, an arch carved with scenes of his reign and the Rotunda, later turned into a church. In the Byzantine centuries the city gained churches with mosaics and frescoes that UNESCO now lists as World Heritage, among them the basilica of Saint Demetrius, its patron saint. Thessaloniki became part of Greece in 1912, and after a fire in the early 20th century its center was rebuilt to a plan by Ernest Hébrard, with a wide square opening to the sea.

The port of Thessaloniki ships containers and bulk cargo for northern Greece and the Balkan countries to the north. The Thessaloniki International Fair opens each September with trade halls in the city center. Bougatsa, a pastry of thin phyllo filled with semolina cream or cheese, is a breakfast sold in bakeries across the city.

The White Tower, a round Ottoman tower of the 15th century on the waterfront, holds a museum of the city's history and has become its emblem. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in Thessaloniki, and his birth house is kept as a museum. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival brings new films from the Balkans and beyond to the cinemas of the harbor warehouses each November.