Visit Macedonia - Thessaloniki

Visit Macedonia - Thessaloniki

The city was founded around 315 BC
by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages. He named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great and princess of Macedon as daughter of Philip II.
Under the Greek kingdom of Macedon the city retained its own autonomy and parliament and evolved to become the most important city in Macedon.


Macedonia today is a geographical region of Greece, and the largest of the Greek territory.

It constitutes most of the geographic and historical region of ancient Macedon, a Greek kingdom ruled by the Argeads whose most celebrated members were Alexander the Great and his father Philip II.

In 336 B.C., Alexander the Great became the leader of the Greek kingdom of Macedonia. By the time he died 13 years later, Alexander had built an empire that stretched from Greece all the way to India. That brief but thorough empire-building campaign changed the world: It spread Greek ideas and culture from the Eastern Mediterranean to Asia. Historians call this era the "Hellenistic period."

The name Macedonia was later applied to identify various administrative areas in the Roman and Byzantine Empires with widely differing borders.