A Reunion in Thessaloniki, Greece – Europe Travels September 2022

Cal and I had only been dating a few months when the Army sent him to a little isolated detachment in northern Greece for a year. This was at the height of the Cold War era. In a pre-internet time where even phone calling was impossible, he wrote me letters. Lots of them, to his credit. I heard about all the antics that he and the guys got into, the day-to-day drudgery, but also all the things he saw and did. He sent back beautiful pictures of Greece, and I thought he was so lucky to be seeing the sights while I was back in the middle of Texas.

He and his buddies lost touch, but Facebook brought them back together. In 2019, they had a reunion in Las Vegas, with many of them attending. This was the year to have a reunion back where it all happened. Amazingly, it dovetailed perfectly with our big Europe trip, which was very exciting!

How to get to Thessaloniki from Venice? It’s too long a distance by train, involving many transfers, so we couldn’t use our Eurail pass. The best deal was, strangely, with Austrian Air. We flew north to Vienna and then south to Thessaloniki.

The city lies on the Aegean Sea north of Athens by about two hundred miles, as the crow flies. Driving that distance would add on another hundred miles. For the reunion, we stayed at the City Hotel in the heart of downtown and a couple of blocks away from the water.

We met two of the guys at the hotel, Milan and Billy. Another, Mark, came later in the day with his wife and additional family members. The reunion was organized by Tom, who has a Greek wife and lives here. That was it for our group. Attendance was small for a long and expensive trip to Greece.

On our first morning we set off with Milan and Billy to explore the White Tower which you can see on the left of the picture above.

It is a long climb up but there are displays on the history of the city on each level, where prison cells had been.

At the top we were rewarded with a great view, and Tom found us here.

The White Tower replaced an old Byzantine fortification in the fifteenth century by the Ottomans. It has a sad past, since it had been a notorious prison and the scene of many executions. When Greece reclaimed it in 1912, it was cleaned up and now it is a symbol of the city.

Over the weekend, there were many recollections of the city back in the day: buildings that were here and are not now, especially the American Embassy, and memories of fun times. Thessaloniki lies about 35 miles from where the detachment was.

Tom was a great guide and walked us around the city a bit. He showed us the old Greek Embassy. When Thessaloniki was under Ottoman Rule, Greece had an embassy here, which sounds really strange. 1912 was the big year; when Greece gained control the embassy was closed. We looked at the Greek Orthodox church next door from its patio.

Later, I needed a nap and when I awoke, the guys had disappeared. I left them to their visiting and went exploring. There was an old Jewish bath house that I wanted to check out, hoping I could peek inside. It was locked tight.

Next to the Jewish baths, there’s a market:

I was pretty glad that I did not need to purchase any meat or fish.

There was one other person to meet besides the Americans: Lefteris Dimopoulos, who had been in the Greek Air Force and had been part of the support for their detachment. He and Tom had put our reunion dinner together, which was at the Greek Officer’s Club. It was a feast of Greek salad, grilled aubergine, squash, and other vegetables, platters of Greek hamburger, souvlaki pork, chicken, pork strips, and french fries, with tzatziki sauce. The food kept coming, the conversations flowed, and we had a great view of the White Tower and sunset on the Aegean. It was spectacular.

Credit for these two pictures goes to Tom.

At night, Thessaloniki comes alive. The Greek Officer’s Club is behind the flags and is where we had our dinner.

The next evening our entire group visited a local seafood restaurant. It was Saturday night and the town was humming. We were there for several hours and for that entire time, every seat was packed in the restaurant inside and on the huge patio outside. The streets were crowded with pedestrians and traffic was down to a crawl. Party time in the city!

We did get to do some other sightseeing in Thessaloniki. This is the Rotunda:

For the Romans who built this Rotunda, the building’s purpose was a place for worshipping their deities. It can be compared to the Pantheon in Rome. Later, it became a Greek Orthodox church, and then a mosque when the Ottomans came to power in the 1500’s. That is why the minaret still stands to the left of the Rotunda. When Greece regained power it reverted back to Greek Orthodox.

There is the ruins of a Roman gate:

What I came to love about Thessaloniki, and all of Greece, is that you can walk anywhere and see ancient ruins. If any kind of building is to be built, a team of archaeologists have to investigate the site and see what’s in the ground first.

So, we were just walking down the street, and we came to a whole complex just below street level. It was once the magnificent home of Caesar Galerius and his court whenever he was in town. There are ruins of a basilica (an audience room), which still partly lies under the street. Additionally, we saw ruins of the Roman baths, and other buildings that made up part of the palace.

I also visited two museums: the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, and the Museum of Byzantine Culture.

In the archaeological museum, antiquities abounded. This is the deed to a house, dated to 350 BC.

The Byzantine museum moved forward in time. This mosaic dates to about the 5th century AD.

I was glad I went to these museums, because they clarified for me what was happening historically in Greece through the centuries. There was the early Macedonian kingdom which was replaced by the Romans. The Roman era went into the Byzantine era, and then Greece was conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century. Their rule lasted until 1912. This is simplified, but it greatly helped to explain everything I was about to see in the coming weeks.

A statue of Alexander the Great looks out to sea on the shores of the Aegean:

Beginning with Italy, our trip began to look like Eat, Pray, Love with an emphasis on “eat”. In Thessaloniki it went full throttle. Every time we were out with the group, there were plates upon plates of food because everyone wanted to try some remembered dish. Out on the street, there are souvlaki stands, and Milan found a good one for us for the times in between when we might be just a little hungry. The smells coming out of the souvlaki stands are incredible.

This is the first meal we had when we came to Thessaloniki, on the patio of a restaurant by the sea:

Over the years, Cal has told me many times about having feta cheese that had been thrown in a wood-fired oven until it was soft, warm, and delectably tasty. Mark shared this memory with him, and they ordered the warm feta appetizer in a couple of restaurants until – Bingo! – one restaurant got the taste exactly right.

I’ve left off a big part of this reunion. On the day after our grand dinner at the Officer’s Club, we traveled to the detachment where the guys had been stationed. It turned out to be more than just a quick view. That’s for next time!

Next time: A Trip to Giannitsa, and Everything Along The Road