NextRadio, founded in 2021, plays a straightforward classic hits format out of Thessaloniki, Greece, the kind of station built to give listeners familiar, well-loved songs rather than chase the newest release. What's easy to miss is that Thessaloniki's own musical canon, the songs that would eventually earn the label "classic" in Greek popular culture, came out of some of the hardest years the city ever lived through.
A City Doubled Overnight by Refugees
Thessaloniki's modern musical identity traces back to 1922, when the Asia Minor Catastrophe sent more than 1.2 million Greek Orthodox refugees from Anatolia into mainland Greece as part of a forced population exchange. Major cities including Thessaloniki nearly doubled in population overnight, and the refugees, many from Smyrna, brought a musical tradition steeped in Eastern melodic color that fused with local styles to help create rebetiko, a genre that would go on to become Greece's most influential popular music by the 1930s.
A National Anthem Written Under Occupation
The genre's most enduring song has a direct Thessaloniki address. Composer Vassilis Tsitsanis lived in the city through the German occupation and wrote "Synefiasmeni Kyriaki," or "Cloudy Sunday," there around 1943 or 1944, describing it later as a response to "the tragic incidents that happened then in our country: starvation, misery, fear, depression, arrests, executions." The song wasn't recorded until 1948, but it has since been called something close to an unofficial national anthem, and it stands as one of the clearest examples of a "classic" born directly out of crisis rather than composed as light entertainment.
What "Classic Hits" Means in This City
NextRadio's programming isn't a rebetiko station, and its playlist draws on a much broader range of Greek and international pop, rock, and hits across decades. But operating a classic hits format from Thessaloniki specifically means broadcasting from the city where the very idea of a Greek musical "classic" was shaped by refugee displacement, wartime hardship, and songs written under conditions no playlist committee would ever choose to recreate. That history sits underneath the format even when the on-air music has nothing to do with it directly.
A Young Station in an Old Musical City
Founded only in 2021, NextRadio is a relatively new addition to Thessaloniki's broadcasting landscape, arriving in a city that has been generating enduring, widely loved songs for a century. Its classic hits format doesn't need to reach back to rebetiko to justify the label, Thessaloniki has been producing music people keep returning to for generations, and a station built around that instinct fits naturally into the city's longer story.