CITY guide
thessaloniki
central MACEDONIA
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CITY guide
central MACEDONIA
Τhe 30-year long wanderings of the Franco-Swiss philhellene and renowned photographer, Frédéric Boissonnas in our country turned to be particularly fortuitous for Mount Olympus. From the journeys he had taken in Greece, between 1903 and 1935, we have inherited valuable and rare imagery, acknowledged today as part of our mobile heritage. Among other things, Boissonnas had been a fanatical alpinist. In 1913, while in Northern Greece for the creation of a photo album ordered by the Greek government, he decided to ascend Mount Olympus. Together with his friend, Daniel Baud-Bovy, Dean of the Geneva School of Fine Arts, and the local guide, Christos Kakkalos, they became the first to conquer the mountain of Gods, reaching Mytikas, its highest peak. There have been three other visits made by Boissonnas to Olympus, resulting in some of the most amazing shots of the mountain. Through the photographer’s exhibitions, Mount Olympus, as well as Greece, became known all over Europe.
about
central macedonia
Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC by Cassander, King of Macedonia. That it was named for his wife, Thessaloniki, who was the daughter of Philip II and the sister of Alexander the Great. History later brought the Romans to Thessaloniki, and they left their mark on the city with the Arch of Galerius.
History, too, was to bring to Thessaloniki the Apostle Paul, who had journeyed into Macedonia to found the first Christian churches. There is a folk tradition that the Gentiles in the city pelted him with stones. And that the Apostle to the Nations lost his Christian patience and pronounced a curse on Thessaloniki: that the stones should never be removed from its streets. And from that day on tradition has called the people of Thessaloniki “Paul-accursed”, and the streets of the city have never yet been cleared of those stones.
History, too, stationed in Thessaloniki a young officer named Diocletian, who became its patron saint under the name Demetrius. And his fame and glory spread with the glory of the Byzantine Empire. This was the age when monuments of faith and art arose throughout the city, in the Byzantine churches.
Half a century later, she sent the city boatloads of persecuted Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. And when, after another three and a half centuries, the opening shots in the struggle for liberation were fired in the Morea in 1821, history brought their echo to Thessaloniki to give wings to the hopes of the enslaved. But their uprising was quenched in their own blood, and another ninety years had to pass before that same history, escorted by the Makedonomachoi, brought freedom to the ancient but still vital city of Saint Demetrius. And it was 26 October 1912, the feast day of the saint.
The visitor who sees the contemporary city with its broad straight streets and tall modern buildings will have trouble imagining what it looked like seventy years ago. Building up a complete and accurate picture requires considerable powers of reconstruction. Then, as now, the city occupied the same core area, from Bexinar to the Dépôt district and from the sea to the walls of the Moni Vlatadon. Only then it had not absorbed so many outlying townships, and its fringes were not so widely flung.
Τhe 30-year long wanderings of the Franco-Swiss philhellene and renowned photographer, Frédéric Boissonnas in our country turned to be particularly fortuitous for Mount Olympus. From the journeys he had taken in Greece, between 1903 and 1935, we have inherited valuable and rare imagery, acknowledged today as part of our mobile heritage. Among other things, Boissonnas had been a fanatical alpinist. In 1913, while in Northern Greece for the creation of a photo album ordered by the Greek government, he decided to ascend Mount Olympus. Together with his friend, Daniel Baud-Bovy, Dean of the Geneva School of Fine Arts, and the local guide, Christos Kakkalos, they became the first to conquer the mountain of Gods, reaching Mytikas, its highest peak. There have been three other visits made by Boissonnas to Olympus, resulting in some of the most amazing shots of the mountain. Through the photographer’s exhibitions, Mount Olympus, as well as Greece, became known all over Europe.
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