Thessaloniki

For most people heading to Halkidiki, Thessaloniki is a stop on the way — an hour for coffee, then on. The city behind that stop is two and a half thousand years old, holds fifteen UNESCO-listed monuments and keeps a student nightlife matched in Greece only by Athens.

On 18 August 1917 a fire burned for thirty-two hours and took a third of the city — around nine and a half thousand houses, with more than seventy thousand people left homeless. Thessaloniki was not put back the way it had been: the French architect Ernest Hébrard was given the job of drawing it again, with long axes and Aristotelous Square opening straight onto the sea. That is why the lower city looks planned and Ano Poli above it does not — the upper town is the one part the fire went around.

Before the war some seventy thousand Jews lived here, descendants of the Sephardim expelled from Spain after 1492. For a stretch of its history they were the majority, and the city was called the mother of Israel. The deportations began in February 1943; by the end of May around fifty thousand people had been taken and more than ninety per cent of the community died. About thirteen hundred remain. Without that fact you cannot explain why a city this size has so few old family shops and so many empty lots downtown.

Thessaloniki is mostly eaten. Bougatsa is filo with semolina custard or cheese, taken in the morning and standing up, and the local version is crisp and barely sweet. Dessert is trigona — filo cones filled with cream, from Panorama, the suburb on the hill above town. In the evening everyone comes down to Ladadika, and that usually runs longer than planned.