I stole half of a day on vacation from the beach and walked around the center of Thessaloniki to explore some sites I've been wanting to visit for a long time.
As every time I stay in Thessaloniki, I walk from the hotel where I am staying to the famous Aristotle Square, and then up the hill, to the Venizelos monument, and across the Roman Forum, further to the Church of the Patron Saint of Thessaloniki.
So this morning, I found myself in front of the church of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki.
I have already seen the interior of the church several times, I wrote about those visits in one of the posts, but this time I had a new experience, which I will write about now.
I found out that the crypt under the church is open to the public and that a tour is possible. I couldn't miss that.
The first church in this place was built in the 4th century, on the remains of the Roman bath where Dimitrije was tortured and killed, who was declared a saint due to his steadfastness in his Christian faith.
In the 5th century, a larger basilica was built, which was destroyed by fire, and rebuilt again in the 7th century, and the church has kept that shape to this day.
During the Ottoman rule, in the 15th century, the church was turned into a mosque, and after a fire in 1917, the restoration of the church lasted from 1926 to 1948, and since then the church has been in the form in which I find it now.
Under the foundations of the church, in the crypt, there is a new and thus an old world.
The world of catacombs, which was hidden and buried from the reconstruction after the great fire in the 7th century until the last reconstruction in the 20th century.
The interesting thing about this church is that, in every renovation, the new church received its upgrade and expansion, as well as its purpose (Christian basilica and Muslim mosque) on the foundations of the previous one, so that all this that is located under the church is a real archaeological site and for believers a place of pilgrimage, because some of these catacombs were the prison in which St. Dimitrije was tortured and killed.
His relics are kept today in the church above these catacombs.
Now in the crypt of the church there is a real exhibition of the Middle Ages.
The drawings of the foundations of the church show where you are at any given moment and how that part looked 15 centuries ago, there are drawings of fragments that made up a whole on a much larger scale and which show how that whole looked before it collapsed, was destroyed or simply lost the battle with time.
In addition to artificial lighting, daylight penetrates into the crypt from cracks and crevices, next to the foundations and walls of the new church, which somewhat breaks the mystique of this place.
But the most mystical and interesting are those parts in which it is dark, and where the light bulbs have highlighted what our attention is drawn to.
Fountain with columns, parts of walls, parts of monuments, capitals of columns and parts of columns, old altar...
No matter which way I go, some cavity in the wall seems like a shelter, which some of them really were...
All the boards with notices and descriptions, historical facts, which I photographed in the crypt, will be a topic that I will devote myself to and probably the same when you read what is written on them.
Then I will create a complete picture in my head of the story of this early medieval church, crypt and catacombs.
And now I'm sharing with you the impressions of my #wednesdaywalk, so that you too can feel a bit of the atmosphere under the foundations of the church, among the 15-century-old excavations.