"The Balkan capital of Greece! " a Thessaloniki Travel Page by Yiannis2000

Thessaloniki is one of the oldest cities in Europe! It is the city I have worked and lived the last seven years, when I returned from Norway.
Thess@ became part of modern Greece just 90 years ago. At that time Greeks were a minority in a town with tens of thousands Jews, Armenians, Slavs, Bulgarians and Turks, to mention just the major groups. Unfortunately few traces of its multicultural past remain to be enjoyed by the modern visitor, great fires devastated the- mainly jewish- center of town in 1917.
But Thess@ is a modern city as well! Walk in the center and choose one of hundreds Cafes, bars, clubs, tavernas or restaurants, they are always crowded- the 70.000+ students in town help to that. Over 7.000 people work in the above mentioned places. Several of my foreign friends have just stopped over at the main railway station and complained the city seemed dull to them. They should have spent a bit more time wandering around!

Thess@ used to be the most important center in the southern Balkans for centuries and remains an important trade and travel humb. It's a town more than 2300 years old, with some few ancient ruins and lots of bysantine churches . After the wars in ex-Yugoslavia Thess@ is the base of the European Union's Balkan reconstruction agency. The atmosphere of history and the variety of the peoples that have shaped this area is still to be felt... Just visit the old walls above the centre and you will notice...

Thessaloniki was the centre of a thriving jewish community for many centuries. Few remain after IIWW, but there is an important museum in the heart of the city, the old jewish center, exhibiting their important contributions to the city and their dramatic history.

Thessas suburbs maintain a strong oriental flavour as the people there came as refugees from Asia Minor, two generations ago; they are also the place where the oriental Pontic Greek language is still spoken by hundreds of thousands of people; a significant proportion of younger Pontians also command Pontic fairly well (with strong influences by Modern Greek).
Recommended reading: "Twice a stranger: the mass explulsions that forged Greece and Turkey" by B. Clark