The symbol of Thessaloniki, the White Tower is a 15^th century fortification which was part of the city’s defences at the point where the seaward defence and the eastern wall met. Originally the barracks for the city’s sentries, in later years it served as a prison for condemned prisoners awaiting execution. It was reconstructed early in the 1980s and has functioned as a museum since 1985.

Today the White Tower is used as the exhibition space of the Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki. For the first few months of 2002 it housed “Byzantine Hours”, an exhibition devoted to ordinary life in Byzantine times.

Exhibits on the first floor were part of the thematic unit entitled “Professionals in the market place”. To be more precise, there were tools and other objects belonging to goldsmiths, blade-smiths, cobblers, glassmakers and tilers, coins and a model of the city of Thessaloniki market place. The second floor was devoted to journeys and trade. So exhibits included objects and texts related to journeys by sea and overland, fairs, spectacles and pilgrimages.

The third floor is focused mainly on the presentation of the Byzantine home and what it was like inside, the decoration, supper, and the neighbourhood. One floor above this there was an exhibition of life at home with garments and footwear, cosmetics, perfume and jewellery, personal grooming, and even superstitions. The theme of the top floor was death, covering burial and graves, funerary customs, finds from graves, gravestone inscriptions from cemeteries, even objects and specimens of magic were on display in the show cases on the top floor of the Tower.