Most New Testament cities are ruins. This one is a working city of about a million people, Greece's second largest. 40.64°N, 22.94°E. The name has run unbroken since 315 BC, when King Cassander of Macedon founded the city and named it after his wife Thessalonike, half-sister of Alexander the Great.
A Verse of Two Words
Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians was likely the earliest of his preserved letters (around AD 51), written from Corinth. The letter ends with a string of brief commands. The most famous, in 5:17, is two words in Greek.
The Greek is adialeiptōs proseuchesthe. Adialeiptōs means without leaving an interval — the same word a doctor of the period would use to describe a fever that does not break. Paul means continual relation, not continual speech. The verse has been quoted by monastic tradition (the Jesus Prayer), Reformation devotional writers (Brother Lawrence's practice of the presence of God), and modern paraphrases. The verse names a posture rather than a schedule.
Why Paul Was There Briefly
Acts 17 records that Paul preached in Thessalonica's synagogue for three Sabbaths before opposition forced him to leave at night. He never returned to the city in person, as far as we know. The two letters compensate. They are unusually warm, full of memory of specific people, and concerned that the new church not lose courage. We were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her children (1 Thessalonians 2:7). The verse on prayer comes near the closing list.
What Survived
Modern Thessaloniki sits on top of the ancient city; very little of the agora Paul preached in is excavated, though the Roman Forum and the Rotunda (an early-fourth-century structure now called the Church of Agios Georgios) are visible and open. The Arch of Galerius (AD 305) still spans Egnatia Street. The Rotunda's dome mosaics — a band of saints and martyrs around a central medallion that has since been lost — are among the earliest large Christian mosaics in existence. Paul's verse was being read aloud here when these structures were new.
A City That Never Quit
Thessalonica became the second city of the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople. It did not outlast Constantinople: the Ottomans took it by siege in 1430, twenty-three years before the capital fell. Under Ottoman rule it was, by some measures, the largest Jewish-majority city in Europe, with a Sephardi population that had arrived after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. The Great Fire of 1917 and the Holocaust altered the city profoundly. The verse Paul wrote was read here through every one of those changes.
Thessaloniki Today
The city of about a million people is a major Mediterranean port, university town, and cultural capital. Aristotle University is here. The waterfront White Tower — Ottoman-era — is the city's most photographed landmark. The verse is still read in Greek Orthodox parishes, the Catholic cathedral on Frangon Street, Protestant churches, and several mosques. One of the oldest Christian addresses in Europe is also one of the few that never had to be rebuilt to hold the verse.
Write It Out
Copy the verse out for yourself. Pray without ceasing. Three words, two in Greek. And the moment you finish writing it, you stop — which is the one thing the sentence asks you not to do. It copies out in seconds, and having finished it is not the same as having done it.
Most biblical cities are excavations. This one is a city.