On arriving curious, finding history in layers, and the question Philippi gave me that I keep asking everywhere else.
By Mary Collins | April 2026
The first morning in Thessaloniki, I could have been in any modern Mediterranean city.
Waterfront cafés, people walking dogs, a promenade along the sea. Nothing that signaled what I was about to spend the next several days discovering.
I am an anthropologist by training. I understand, at least in theory, how civilizations accumulate on top of each other. I had read about Rome, about Byzantium, about what happened in the eastern Mediterranean over two thousand years.
I was not prepared for what it looks like when those layers are still standing inside a city where people are also going about their Tuesday.
Later that first day, our scholar led us through a gate in an old wall into the upper part of the city. The walls are Byzantine — built and rebuilt between roughly the 4th and 7th centuries AD, on Roman foundations, repaired again under the Ottomans. They are still largely intact. They run through residential neighborhoods. People have built lives around them.
That was when I understood that Thessaloniki was going to require a different kind of attention than I had brought to travel before.
The city wasn’t going to present itself all at once. It was going to require patience.
Over the following days, the layers kept surfacing.
The White Tower on the waterfront — built by the Ottomans in the 15th century on the site of an earlier Byzantine tower. For much of its history it served as a fortress and a prison; a massacre inside it in the 1820s earned it the name “the Bloody Tower” before it was whitewashed. You can walk to the top now and look out over the whole city: the sea in one direction, the old Byzantine walls climbing the hills in the other.
The Arch of Galerius on Egnatia Street — a Roman triumphal arch built around 305 AD to commemorate a military victory over the Persian Empire. The carved reliefs still show the campaign in detail. It stands at a traffic intersection. Taxis wait nearby.
Each structure was built by people who found the previous civilization’s work still standing and decided, for their own reasons, to build around it rather than erase it.
The city is not a sequence of eras. It’s a record of every group of people who decided this place mattered.
We drove to Philippi on one of those days. The battlefield where the Roman Republic effectively ended in 42 BC — where Brutus and Cassius lost to Mark Antony and Octavian, and the path toward empire became, for practical purposes, irreversible.
Standing there, I kept thinking about what it takes for a political system to hold. The Roman Republic had built extraordinary institutions to prevent any single person from accumulating permanent power — checks, balances, the deliberate distribution of authority across many hands. Those institutions stood for centuries.
And then they didn’t.
Was that inevitable? Or was it contingent — specific decisions by specific people who might, in different circumstances, have chosen differently? I don’t have an answer. I have a question I now carry whenever I read about political systems and how they hold or fail.
A century after that battle, Paul wrote to the small Christian community that had formed at Philippi — the first in Europe. He was writing to Roman citizens, and he used the vocabulary of Roman citizenship — membership, rights, responsibilities, belonging — to describe a community organized around entirely different principles.
Once you know where the letter was sent and who was reading it, it is unmistakably a political text.
I had read Paul’s letter to the Philippians before Thessaloniki. I had not understood it the same way until I stood on the ground where it was received.
This is what that first trip gave me.
I came more curious than prepared — an anthropologist’s instinct for layers, a half-finished reading list, and a willingness to let the place teach me in whatever order it chose. What the city gave me, slowly, over several days, was the beginning of questions I couldn’t have formulated before I arrived.
Not answers. A better grade of question.
The trips aren’t the capstone. They’re where the question begins.
Far Horizons runs the Greece tour for travelers who are ready to ask better questions than they arrived with. The reading list is there if you want it. The trip works either way.
