Greece · Central Macedonia · Thessaloníki
Upper Town, Thessaloníki — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Ano Poli is the old upper town of Thessaloníki, the hillside quarter that climbs toward the acropolis inside the city's surviving Byzantine walls. The Great Fire of 1917 spared it. Its Ottoman-era timber houses and narrow cobbled lanes still follow a street plan the lower city lost, and the Trigonion Tower anchors its eastern corner. From the top lanes the whole town drops away to the Thermaic Gulf.
About Upper Town
Where to stay in Upper Town
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Staying in Ano Poli means quiet, long views, and a steep walk home. Beds are few. A handful of guesthouses and small hotels fill restored Ottoman houses along the lanes, nothing near the scale of the waterfront district below.
What the quarter gives you instead is the walled old town at the door, with the ramparts and the Trigonion Tower a short climb above and the Byzantine churches of Osios David and Agios Nikolaos Orfanos a few streets away. Travellers set on the seafront, the museums, or late-night bars do better to sleep in the lower centre and come up by day.
About Upper Town
What are the main landmarks in Upper Town?
The walls themselves are the headline sight: a near-continuous circuit of Byzantine masonry that rings the quarter, climbing to the Heptapyrgion fortress at the summit and dropping to the Trigonion Tower at the eastern corner. Inside them stands a cluster of small Byzantine churches. Osios David keeps a rare early mosaic of Christ, while the Church of Saint Nicholas Orphanos holds some of the finest fourteenth-century wall paintings in the city.
Higher up sit the Church of Prophet Elijah and Vlatades Monastery, whose terrace gives the classic view down over the roofs to the gulf. The Church of Saint Catherine completes it.
What is the history of Upper Town?
The upper town grew up behind the walls that Theodosian and later Byzantine builders threw around the hill above Thessaloníki, with the acropolis and the Heptapyrgion holding the high ground. After the Ottoman conquest of 1430 it became the city's principal Muslim quarter, and the fortress at the summit, renamed Yedi Kule, served first as a garrison and later as a prison. Timber houses and small mosques filled the lanes, and several older Byzantine churches stayed in use.
The Great Fire of 1917 gutted the lower city but never reached this slope, which is why its Ottoman street plan and old houses still stand. That accident of survival sets it apart.
Where is Upper Town?
The quarter occupies the steep northern slope of the historic centre, held between the crown of Byzantine ramparts above and the denser lower town that spreads below it toward the sea. Above sit the acropolis and the Heptapyrgion fortress, the citadel the Ottomans called Yedi Kule. The Trigonion Tower guards the eastern angle.
Downhill the lanes spill onto Olympiados and Kassandrou, the streets that divide Ano Poli from the flat Roman-era centre.
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More areas in Thessaloníki
Updated July 2026