Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki

Major museum with Macedonian gold treasures and Roman mosaics

The Archaeological Museum sits near the White Tower and YMCA, a 1960s building that holds one of the most important collections of Macedonian antiquities anywhere. The ground floor covers prehistoric and Bronze Age Macedonia; the upper floors present the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods in well-lit rooms with good English labelling.

The undisputed highlight is the gold jewellery and grave goods from royal Macedonian tombs — pieces of astonishing technical skill that survive from an era when this region was the centre of the known world. The Roman mosaic collection on the ground floor is also exceptional: enormous coloured floor panels removed from Roman villas and townhouses across northern Greece. Allow two hours; the gift shop sells good reproductions of the gold wreaths.

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The museum's most famous objects are the gold burial goods from Macedonian royal tombs at Derveni and Vergina: intricate gold wreaths, bronze kraters, jewellery of extraordinary delicacy. The Derveni krater — a bronze vessel standing 90 cm tall, decorated with a frieze of Dionysian revellers in high relief — was buried with a Macedonian aristocrat around 320 BC and is considered one of the finest surviving examples of ancient Greek metalwork.