Alexander the Great's Dad's Tomb :)

On April 15^th (I’m obviously trying to catch up on blogging at this point) we bussed to the Archeological  Museum in the city of Verginia on the site of 3rd century BC Macedonian kings. One of the tombs has been determined to be King Phillip II, father of Alexander the Great. You could tell that the site was interesting because there were a ton of Greek people there too, not just tourists :) We couldn’t actually take pictures inside the museum, which was a bummer because the tombs were really impressive. Archeologists found the burial site in a hillside and they just built the museum into the hill. Several of the front tombs had been sacked, but the most important ones, including Phillip II and possibly Alexander IV, son of Alexander the Great were left undisturbed upon their discovery. You would walk into a separate room and down a set of stairs to the entrance door, with the tomb towering overhead. All of the artifacts that were found in those tombs are displayed in the museum; mostly weapons, coins and armor, that would be buried with the kings. It still amazes me to see things that were made 1000's of years ago, coming from such a rich history that I haven’t really been exposed to before this trip.

Then we went to Thessaloniki, the second biggest city in Greece and an extremely important port in the region. I always like it when we do visit larger cities since Ioannina is so small - it’s about a quarter of the size of Seattle. We mostly just walked around the waterfront and checked out the ‘White Tower of Thessaloniki’.  Built by the Ottomans, it was originally named the ‘Red Tower’ or ‘Tower of Blood’ because of a massacre from when it was used as a prison. When Greece regained the city they renamed it the more pleasant present day ‘White Tower’.  I’m really glad that these excursions are included in my program because Thessaloniki was a 4 hour drive away from Ioannina, so I probably wouldn’t have been able travel there on my own :)