Thessaloniki shopping and markets

Tsimiski, and the arcades behind it

Tsimiski is the street the city shops on. It runs parallel to the water from the edge of Ladadika east through the centre, three minutes from our door, and the shops thicken as you go. What makes it worth walking is what sits behind it. A run of covered arcades from the early twentieth century cuts through the blocks between Tsimiski and Mitropoleos, and they are full of small businesses that never left. Jewellers, small bookshops, coffee counters set into the middle of a passage. Terkenlis holds the corner of Tsimiski and Aristotelous, which is as good a landmark as any for working out where you are.

Independents

Valaoritou, where the makers are

A few blocks north of Tsimiski, Valaoritou was the garment trade for most of the last century, and the buildings still look it. Old commercial blocks, dim stairwells, floor after floor of former workrooms. What moved in after the trade left was small and hands-on. Fiera Handmade works out of Valaoritou 33, a room that is a workshop first and a shop second. The jewellery, the soy candles and the printed textiles were made where you are standing, and there are classes in the same space every month. Round the corner on Plateia Chrematistiriou, the Strataki sisters run Jenny Blond, where nothing on the rail is under twenty years old and the new arrivals land on a Friday.

Books and records

IANOS opened on Aristotelous 7 in September 1984 and the whole chain grew out of that one shop, which still has a gallery and a room that runs events through the year. Up on Alexandrou Svolou, Akyvernites Politeies is a cooperative run by the people who work there, part bookshop and part café, with a publishing imprint of its own. For vinyl there are two. Velona Records on Mitropoleos was opened by two friends in 2017 and carries new and second-hand alongside CDs and books. Lotus has been behind Agia Sofia on Skra since December 1990, which makes it older than most of the people digging through it.

The markets

Kapani, Modiano, Athonos

Three market squares sit within a couple of blocks of each other behind Aristotelous, within eight minutes of our door. Kapani, which locals still call Vlali, is the oldest food market in the city that has never stopped trading, and it is the loud one. Arrive early and hungry. Fishmongers calling prices, butchers, cheesemongers, greengrocers and spice merchants between the stalls. Modiano next door is the grand one, a glass and steel hall from the 1920s that reopened as an Ergon food hall and is still finding its feet. Athonos is the calm third, a square of fishmongers and mezedopoleia with Petros Semkos dry-ageing fish at the Fisheria counter. Off Olympou there is Bit Bazaar, antique stalls in the daytime that turn into mezedopoleia with rebetiko at night.

The Bezesteni, still a shop

The oldest retail building in Thessaloniki is a covered Ottoman market from the middle of the fifteenth century, put up under Mehmed II, with six lead-roofed domes and four entrances. It stands where Venizelou meets Solomou. What surprises visitors is that it never became a museum. Nobody converted it. Shops still trade inside, under a roof from the fifteenth century, and the entrance sits beside the Venizelou metro station.

Buying food you will actually cook

Every suite has a full kitchen, which changes what a market is for. It stops being sightseeing. Three minutes from the door on Fragkon, the greengrocer they call barba-Thomas has sourced from Greek producers since 2020, and it carries cheese, cured meat, olives and pulses alongside the fruit. Komninon 12 holds the Pantopoleio tis Thessalonikis, a family grocery going since 1922 whose first counter stood inside the Modiano market itself, now third generation with an organic shop next door. ERGON Agora took over the old Rivoli cinema on Pavlou Mela in 2015 and put a greengrocer, a butcher, a fishmonger and a bakery under a thousand square metres of roof. And for coffee to take home, Ermeidis has roasted on Venizelou since 1971, the family in the city since 1922.

Carrying it back

The five suites sit on the fourth floor at 13 Ernestou Emprar, which puts the whole of this page inside a short walk. The kitchen is the part that matters here. You can buy fish at Kapani in the morning and cook it that night, keep the cheese in a real fridge, and put a week of clothes through a washing machine. There is a lift, which you will be glad of on the way back up with bags.

• Modiano and Kapani markets →
• A Thessaloniki food guide →
• Cafés and sweets →
• The suite in detail →