4. Museums around OTE Tower

The OTE Tower of Thessaloniki is an iconic structure located in the heart of the city, within  the HELEXPO International Exhibition and Congress Centre, Greece's largest exhibition and conference venue. It stands 76 metres tall and is the only tower of its kind in Greece. 

Completed in 1970, it played an important role in the history of Greek telecommunications, as it was from here that the first black and white broadcasts of Greek national television were transmitted. Its name – OTE – comes from the Greek acronym for the Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation.

It appears futuristic, even today, and its most remarkable feature is the rotating top floor, which completes a full turn every 60 minutes. The top floor houses a café-bar, offering panoramic views of Thessaloniki. 

The OTE Tower is also a good starting point from which to visit some of Thessaloniki’s most important museums, which are all within a short walking distance.

Directly opposite the OTE Tower, on Stratou Avenue, is the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the central museum of northern Greece as it represents the entire history of Macedonia. 

Included in the permanent collection are masterpieces of ancient Greek art dating from the prehistoric period to late antiquity. 

Visiting the museum offers the chance to explore prehistoric Macedonia through artefacts from the Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age, which reveal the survival practices of prehistoric people, as well as social perceptions and ideological concerns of the time. You'll also learn about the social and economic changes of the Iron Age, which paved the way for the creation of cities.

There are exhibits detailing the lives of Macedonians, from the formation of the independent Macedonian kingdom to the later imperial period, when Macedonia was a province of the Roman Empire. Other exhibits focus exclusively on ancient Thessaloniki.

Particularly impressive is the collection of gold wreaths and other valuable finds from ancient Macedonian cemeteries, reflecting the wealth and grandeur of the Macedonian kingdom. The star of the show here is the Derveni Krater, a magnificent bronze Hellenistic-period vessel, from 330 to 320 BC, and the Derveni Papyrus, the oldest surviving piece of papyrus in Greece, from around 320 to 250 BC, Europe’s oldest “book” and included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Finally, before leaving the museum, you get to admire outdoor exhibits, including funerary monuments, statues, engraved columns and other finds from the 1st to the 7th centuries BC.

Round off your visit in the museum café, located in a leafy garden, with a coffee or maybe even a refreshing cocktail.

Next to the Archaeological Museum on Stratou Avenue is Thessaloniki’s Museum of Byzantine Culture. The impressive building it is housed in was designed by distinguished architect Kyriakos Krokos and it is one of the most important museums in the city and in Greece. In 2005 it won the Council of Europe Museum Prize, awarded by the European Museum Forum. 

With over 2,000 years of history, Thessaloniki is like an open-air museum, with monuments representing its Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman past. And if there’s one period with which the city’s historical identity is especially linked, it’s the Byzantine era, when Thessaloniki flourished as an important centre of Byzantium for more than a thousand years.

The Byzantine Museum’s permanent collection spans 11 rooms and contains over 3,000 exhibits from Thessaloniki and Macedonia. They date from the 2nd to the 20th century AD, covering all aspects of Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture. 

You start with exhibits from the Early Byzantine period – in other words, the founding of Constantinople in 330 AD – and continue with artefacts from the 8th to the 12th century, including items from the Iconoclastic period, a crucial era for Byzantium when the veneration of religious images, or icons, was fiercely debated and often prohibited.

The museum also presents the Byzantine dynasties through genealogical trees, burial customs, items representing the religious worldview of the time, defensive systems, and daily life and urban organisation within city walls, as well as ecclesiastical embroidery and silversmithing, liturgical books, and many other unique exhibits. It also presents the artistic and intellectual development that prevailed just before the end of the Byzantine Empire and how Byzantine expression continued under Ottoman and Venetian rule.

Finally, the museum has a remarkable collection of 18th and 19th century engravings, which served as the main means of communication of monasteries with the outside world, and an extensive collection of Byzantine icons dating from the late 14th to the 19th century.

The MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art is housed in one of the oldest buildings at the HELEXPO International Exhibition & Conference Centre, near Thessaloniki’s OTE Tower. The Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus for short) was created in 2018 when four museums in Thessaloniki and one in Athens joined forces to form a new, unified cultural institution with a mission to jointly promote contemporary art, photography, experimental arts and sculpture through exhibitions, projects, initiatives and collaborations. 

The MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art houses a permanent collection of works by Andy Warhol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Takis and other international and Greek artists from the collection of Alexandros Iolas, an influential figure in the 1960s and 70s art world, as well as donated works from the collections of Achilleas Apergis, Alexandros Xydis and others. The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions, with an emphasis on the study and documentation of all contemporary art movements. The museum’s recent renovation offers visitors an enhanced, multi-dimensional experience. And leave time to visit the MOMus Art Shop for stylish gifts and the MOMus Art Café for coffee and delicious snacks.