The Macedonian moment

The year 2018 has been exceptionally warm and the mid October was still much above the average temperatures.  So when I considered whether to change the winter tires the idea sounded silly in the temperature of plus 17 Celsius. The idea sounded even sillier when the consideration was should I need winter tires as we come back from Thessaloniki where the temperature would be constantly over twenty degrees. I also looked at the long term forecast and noticed the temperature would be over zero in the night we would come back. So I didn’t change the tires.

Biking just before the trip to Thessaloniki

And no, we didn’t drive to Thessaloniki, we flew. The flight was a bit silly, first fly over the destination to Athens and then fly backwards over the Aegean sea. And we had quite a hurry, the check in was almost completed when we landed. However we were guided straight to the gate via extra route – it seems Greeks are masters of handling exception situations.     

Happy to get the connecting flight from Athens

   The first evening at the balcony of the hotel

  Our view to the sea

The hotel has the name The Queen Olga. Olga was a daughter of the Russian emperor Nikolai the First and married the Greek King Giorgios.

Meeting Queen Olga

The hotel is situated about two kilometres from the centre of the city. It is run by a family, my travel bureau (= my spouse) prefers booking this kind of hotels to support the local people. 

     The room service was ok.

Thessaloniki is the second-largest city in Greece, with over 1 million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of Greek Macedonia. It is situated by the Aegean Sea. It is founded  just after Alexander the Great period and have lived Hellenistic , Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and finally the nowadays Greek periods.  The city became a part of Greece as late as 1912 after the war between Turkey and Greece. Then the big amount of population was sort of swapped: The Turks living there for centuries had to go and the Greeks who had lived in Anatolia area moved to town.

  

The town has been damaged quite a lot during the various wars so the whole picture is a mixture of old and new. The essential element is a Byzantine church, smaller and bigger here and there. The archaeological excavations may be seen everywhere, you just cannot build anything there without hitting something from the ancient world. The remains of the old fortress system may be seen in the White Tower by the sea and the bigger ruin area on the top of the hill.

Walking to the city at the seaside

At the White Tower 

The first morning we decided to get the overall of the city. So we walked by the sea to the White Tower and took the Hoponhopoff through the city to the fortress hill. On the hill also the old town is situated but opposite to many other towns it is mostly for living and there is only very few shops and bars. We walked through the ruins and old streets and admired the view to the town and the sea beneath us.

The twigs of the trees swept our heads while travelling in the second store

 

At the wall of the fortress

We took another hoponhopoff to the city to have something to eat. We chose a fish restaurant. In the menu I chose bream fillet. Bream is a very common fish in Finnish lakes and also considerable tasty but very rarely available, mostly because of its bony flesh. This one I was served was even tastier and without a single bone! Later it turned out bream actually meant gilthead which actually is related to perch and not at all any bream. 

With the so-called bream

When we wanted to pay the check the result was an extra dessert. The result of the second request was free collection of  liquers and rakis....

In the evening we were invited to a concert by Iphigeneia. She is a friend of my spouse from their time at the University in German and they haven’t met for over thirty years. So Iphigeneia came to get us to the Concert Hall in her car. When Iphigeneia and my spouse met it was like there wouldn’t have been any gap in their friendship.

The concert repertoire consisted of chamber music of a Russian-German composer Alfred Scnittke. Scnittke uses the musical material very economically and on the other hand he combines the late romantic and modern material opposing each others.

After the concert we were invited to the after party by the pianist of the concert. So we had a nice evening with Greek ladies.

With Iphigeneia...

...and the other ladies

According to the forecast the next day was said to be the warmest during our visit so we chose it for our beach trip. There aren’t any beaches very near Thessaloniki but a bit further in the east there are a lot of beaches available. There are three peninsulas east of the city with lots of sand and sun. The problem was we had to use the bus and the bus station was about ten kilometres away from the city, obviously because of a gigantic Ikea near it. Luckily Iphigeneia drove us there, otherwise we would have to take a bus to Ikea and another to the bus station!

We chose the nearest peninsula. The bus had no hurry in getting there so we had a marvellous opportunity to see Macedonian views. This part of the province had quite small hills covered by olive trees, wineyards and fruit trees of different kinds. The autumn colours in the fruit trees were from yellow to very bright orange. I also spotted some artificially looking hills which I presumed to be ancient tombs.

A view from the bus window

Our destination was a little village Kallithea on the eastern side of the peninsula. The village situates  near the sea lying down under the steep slope. The tourist season was over and there were only few people in the village and on the beach. The wind was calm and the waves very gentle so it was very pleasant just to relax in the sea. After swimming we had a little sunbath. It was pleasant to shut the eyes and hear the sound of diagonally entering waves wandering from the right ear to the left ear.

Souvlaki moment in the village 

In the gentle waves of the Aegean Sea

We, two Russian lads and a Swedish family on the beach

The next day we spent quite a lot of time in the Archaeological Museum. There we saw the basic exhibition and special exhibition about the handicraft from the stone ages to the Byzantine era. The Macedonian district is rich of many kinds of reminiscences of the past. And it turned out I had been right during our bus trip, the artificial looking hills really were tombs.

Masterpieces from the ancient era

In the afternoon we were invited for a dinner to the home of Iphigeneia. She lives with her 90 years old mother in the flat quite near our hotel. Because of Air bnb boom she had lost her cottage in the same peninsula we just visited. And it had just turned out she have to move from the flat they have hired the last 44 years for almost similar plans of the landlord.

The dinner visit was prolonged to the evening, we had so much to talk about. The mother turned out to be a very bright and civilized lady and she told us about the life in Thessaloniki and other parts of Europe where she and her family have lived. She also seemed to like me specially – once she had had two brothers and an old closet full of wonderful old ladies costumes which they all three tried on when they used to played as they were kids.

The last day we still walked in the city to spot some historical places, such as the main cathedral and an ancient forum area. Naturally we also made some shopping, for example I updated my red handbag.

The main Cathedral, not too big though 

The Thessaloniki Forum

At noon we took a taxi to the airport. We took some extra time to be in time and not to hurry in any way. Unfortunately it didn’t help to be in time the whole trip: The connecting flight from Munich to Helsinki was almost two hours late! So when we arrived in Helsinki airport car park it was about 1.30 a.m. And despite the forecast the temperature was below the zero and the car covered with frost. Since we hadn’t winter tires I had to be extra careful in foggy places where there was a danger of black ice on the surface of the road. But as you can see we made it.

After such an experience it wasn’t too hard to entice myself to change the tires.

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