We flew from Crete, the southernmost island in Greece, to Thessaloniki, its northernmost mainland city.  Thessaloniki is also known as Salonica, or Salonika.  With a population of approximately one million, it is Greece’s second largest city, after Athens.

      Thessaloniki is also the capital of the region of  Macedonia, where the most famous member of its ancient ruling dynasty was Alexander the Great.  The city was founded in 315 BCE by Cassander, who named it in honor of his wife, Alexander’s sister Thessaloniki. This connection did not deter Cassander from murdering Alexander’s son and heir in order to seize the throne. Then as now, every family included some decidedly unsavory characters.

         As in Athens, our accommodation was a two-room suite in a renovated pre-war apartment building.  The boutique hotel was furnished throughout with a melange of 20th Century pieces and antiques, from gramophones to chandeliers and statuary.

An early rotary telephone sat on the desk in our sitting room in the Capsis Bristol Hotel.

Our bedroom window overlooked a square filled with casual restaurants.

       The White Tower stands beside the curve of the harbor where massive defensive walls once intersected.  Originally erected by the Byzantines in the 1200’s and rebuilt on the same spot by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th Century,  the round tower is the symbol of Thessaloniki.  The Turks used it as a particularly punitive prison.  One story explains the color of the tower as the work of an inmate who attempted to reduce the length of his incarceration by painting the prison’s exterior white.

       I think that I developed an immediate fondness for Thessaloniki once it became the setting for my reunion with A.  We had expected to meet there until Aegean Airlines cancelled A.’s flight from Israel, just a week before she was scheduled to fly.  Then, a day before the time that we had set and suddenly been forced to abandon, she found a seat on a different airline.  The hotel was full, as A. already had cancelled her room reservation.  Somehow, in response to our pleading, the manager found a place for her.  It was little short of miraculous that her visit could happen after all.

     In 2023, Manolis Tzompanakis made his concrete and metal statue of a woman climbing the steps of  a bus.  The contemporary work directs attention to the effort that daily domestic activities require.  We saw it on the Plateia Aristotelous, a wide pedestrian mall.