Salonika

The saying goes: “see Naples and die’. But our riposte might be ‘feast in Salonika and truly live!’ The city remains at the heart of The Greek Project but not only for its scrumptious, gastronomic delights. Historically, its multiculturalism embracing Jews, Christians and Muslims is something we particularly cherish and so want to impart to our friends. Each time we come here something more about Salonika’s long, contested and sometimes very traumatic past is revealed. And it’s also why culture and cuisine combine so well on this tour. Without the many faceted influences from the Balkans and across the Aegean to Asia Minor and far beyond, and without its wave upon wave of refugees, Salonika would never have become a more than two-millennia-long cosmopolitan hub. Which means that to understand the contemporary port-city, its peoples, and its food, is to sample not only all manner of choice morsels which a trip to Salonika’s historic markets can offer but to go in search of its resplendent Byzantine churches, its remaining sufi shrine, and resonances of a lost Sephardi culture beneath the city streets. At the core of this trip is a hands-on culinary workshop and hence communally prepared feast which has never failed to delight. But the tour is also about Salonika’s hinterland, not least Vergina, the quite extraordinary site of classical Macedonia’s royal tombs.