The last stop of the trip is Thessaloniki. Some of you may recognize the name from the two books of the New Testament and where the apostle Paul visited. This is the second largest city in Greece (the first being Athens), it has basically played a major role in every empire that has controlled Greece, it is named after Alexander the Great's half sister, in the first half of last year it imported and exported 7.2 million tons of products (making it the second largest and most important ports in the Balkans), and it is the birth place of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who is the founder of modern Turkey. So, it is an important place. We took a bus tour around the city and saw the walls of the Old City (medieval not ancient) and the White Tower, which has a very bloody history. We also drove past Aristotle University, which is the largest University in Greece. The patron saint of the city is St. Demetrius, who is said to have saved the city during a battle. We stopped by the St. Demetrius church, which was basically a larger version of the churches that we saw in Meteora. We got to go down into the crypt in the church. This isn't as spooky as it may seem seeing as the only body that it housed (the body of St. Demetrius) was moved into the main body of the church for all to enjoy. This church was interesting because there were old and new mosaics/frescoes juxtaposed.
That's pretty much all that we did in Thessaloniki.
No comments:
Post a Comment