The Rotunda Menu

Every city starts with a name, and mine was named after a woman. In 315 BC Cassander, king of Macedon, founded Thessaloniki and named it after his wife Thessalonike, the half-sister of Alexander the Great. Historians suspect, however, that the marriage was more politics than romance, so I would suggest you hold your “aww, how romantic” for the time being.

On the hill where the Rotunda stands today there was possibly nothing yet, only the slope down to the sea. People still had to eat, though, and the Greeks of the time fried batter in olive oil and poured honey over it. Athenian comic poets mention these tiganites more than a century earlier, which makes them some of the oldest pancakes on record.

Around the year 50, a Jewish tentmaker from Tarsus reached the city along the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that ran from the Adriatic to Byzantium. His name was Paul, and he preached in the city’s synagogue for three Sabbaths. He won friends, made enemies, and was driven out of the city.

But he kept writing back. His first letter to the Thessalonians is among the oldest Christian texts that survive, and his first letter to the Corinthians holds the earliest written account of the Last Supper. His legacy to what became the world’s largest religion is worth remembering, and it is pivotal to the city’s history. He wrote of bread and wine, broken and shared, as the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The hill of the Rotunda was probably still empty, but not forever. In time, the faith Paul preached would fill its magnificent walls and dome.

Galerius was a soldier emperor who, like other emperors of his time, persecuted Christians and loved monuments. Around 300 he made Thessaloniki his residence and built a palace, the arch we still call Kamara, and, around 306, a great round hall of brick. Its original purpose remains uncertain. It was perhaps raised as a temple, perhaps as an emperor’s tomb. If the tomb was meant for Galerius, he never lay in it. He died in 311 and was buried far to the north, at Felix Romuliana, in modern-day Serbia. By tradition, a young officer named Demetrius was executed in these years for refusing to give up his faith, the same Demetrius who would soon become the city’s saint.

Across the Roman world, working people ate simple food like moretum, garlic and cheese pounded with herbs and oil. A Roman poem once credited to Virgil describes a farmer making it before dawn.

The persecutions were in vain. Within a century the empire was Christian, and the emperor’s round hall in Thessaloniki became a church. Craftsmen covered its dome with gold mosaics of saints standing before shimmering palaces, and many of them still shine today. The persecutor’s building now honoured martyrs, and Demetrius became the city’s patron saint.

Above all, the Roman Empire lived on, but with important changes. Constantine the Great made Constantinople his capital, and Thessaloniki became the empire’s second city, the symbasileuousa, the “co-reigning” city, as we still proudly call it. That empire, Greek in language and culture, lasted for more than a thousand years, a pillar of Christendom and an empire to marvel at.

Orthodox Christians remember their dead with koliva, boiled wheat sweetened with honey and scattered with pomegranate and nuts. In the 9th century two Byzantine brothers from this city, Cyril and Methodius, created Glagolitic, the first Slavic alphabet, and Byzantine faith and customs travelled north. Today koliva is shared at memorials from Thessaloniki to Belgrade, Sofia and Bucharest.

The Ottomans took the city in 1430. Around 1590 the church became a mosque, and a minaret rose beside the dome, where it still stands. By then Selanik, as the Turks called it, or Saloniko to its Jews, was one of the great Jewish cities of the world, home to Sephardic families expelled from Spain in 1492.

Greeks, Turks, Jews and their Balkan neighbours lived in Thessaloniki, and they all ate much the same rice pudding but called it by different names. Its main ingredient, rice, had travelled from Asia, and some of the oldest rice ever found comes from Hunan, the province whose capital is Changsha.

The city’s Jewish community remained until the dark times of the Second World War. In 1943 the Nazis deported more than 45,000 of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz. Very few came back.

On 26 October 1912, the feast day of Saint Demetrius, the Ottoman garrison surrendered and the city became part of Greece. The mosque became a church again, and its minaret survived, unlike almost every other one in the city.

The salad on this course is probably younger than that day. And while it is called Greek, and its olives, olive oil and feta are native to these lands, its tomato and pepper came from the Americas, its cucumber from India and its onion probably from Central Asia. It is a fair recipe for a country, too, made from many places and now served on tables all over the world.

Ten years later the city filled with people who had lost everything. When the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 ended, more than a million Greeks of Anatolia came to Greece. Thessaloniki took in more than a hundred thousand, and my great-grandmother was one of them. She left Smyrna, today’s İzmir, on a ship. Her father did not make it.

Many found their first shelter in the city’s churches and mosques, as an exhibition inside the Rotunda recalled in 2022. The refugees brought their kitchens with them, and Smyrna’s cylindrical meatballs, rich with cumin and wine-soaked bread, became a Thessaloniki classic. The exchange of populations agreed in 1923 also sent the city’s Muslims the other way, and they too left homes behind. Many families here carry a version of this story, and many of them smell of cumin.

Today the Rotunda is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, a Roman hall with Byzantine gold and an Ottoman minaret, open to visitors. Since 2021 Thessaloniki has also been a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and if you ask a local where to begin, you will be sent for bougatsa at dawn, ideally after a long night out.

Crisp phyllo, warm semolina cream, icing sugar and cinnamon. Its name is a cousin of the Italian focaccia and the Turkish poğaça, all descended from the Roman panis focacius, the hearth bread. One word, carried through every empire on this menu. Kali orexi.