Thessaloniki; Sunday, 16 October, 2016

I had an early breakfast as I’d noticed that a lot of the sites I wanted to visit only opened 8-3. Despite that it was still gone 9.30 by the time I finally set off and up the hill to my first stop of the morning the church of Saint Dimitri.

When I got there a service was still in full swing so I had to wait a little time before I could go in, along with a large number of other tourists, so by the time the congregation exited there were an equal number waiting to get in and it was a bit of a crush to look around.

From the church it was a short walk down the hill to the ancient agora and Roman Forum. This is one of the largest exposed archaeological sites in the city centre and has significant parts of a theatre and some of the market area open to look around.

Having taken in the agora I walked a little further, through one of the city markets where a number of restaurants were already open for lunch with beautiful smells emanating, and onto the city’s most important church – Agia Sofia – I had a long look around this spectacular Byzantine church, which thankfully wasn’t too busy with tourists.

After looking around the church I decided that breakfast had been a long time ago so I backtracked to one of the restaurants in the market for a very nice lunch.

From the market I continued my walk across town and onto the Archaeological museum located near the White Tower. There was a lot to see in the museum and I thought I was going to struggle to see everything before they closed at 3 – but it turned out that they were still on their summer timetable and were staying open to 5 so I didn’t have to rush round.

Located just being the Archaeological museum is the Byzantium museum and that was my next stop of the afternoon.

By the time I’d finished looking around the Byzantium museum I had a very advanced case of museum feet and as it was already getting dark I decided to cheat and catch a cab back to the hotel.