Today we walked almost 20,000 steps, 19,723 to be exact, so you guessed it, we walked all over Thessaloniki today. All the major sites are very close to our apartment. There are lots of old churches and monuments, some dating back to 300 AD.
We started the morning by going out for breakfast. There are coffee/pastry shops on almost every corner here. Some have very elaborate pastries. I think the Thessalonikians really like their desserts.
Then we continued down the street and there were a lot of people in traditional Greek costumes milling about a church called Ayia Sofia. It turns out that May 19 is Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day. The Greek genocide, including the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of Christian Ottoman Greeks, carried out in Turkey during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922) on the basis of religion and ethnicity. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. It looked like it would be a while before the remembrance commenced so we didn’t hang around.
Here are some of the places we went (the blue dot is our apartment).
We went into a number of churches and we saw many worshippers circulating the religious icons and venerating them by kissing them.
If you are interested, you can read more about it here.
Here are some pictures from our walk.
By this time we were hungry so we stop for a gyro which was very good. Then we walked down to the harbor and out on the pier. Rick had a coffee.
In Thessaloniki there are a lot of people riding scooters. They have a scooter system, similar to Boston’s bluebikes. You have an app on your phone and you scan a code on the scooter into your phone and you are charged for the scooter. Looks like fun!
We returned to the apartment and relaxed for the evening.