By the late 1960s, Greek television was finally about to start regular broadcasting. The state telecommunications company OTE needed a tower in Greece's second city to carry the new VHF signals across the Thermaic Gulf and the surrounding plain. The Thessaloniki International Fair grounds, in the heart of the modern city, offered a 435-square-meter site next to the South Gate. Construction came in two phases. In phase one, between 1966 and 1969, the architect's design was approved, foundations were dug, and the basement plus first floor went up so the unfinished 8.4-meter stub could serve as the OTE pavilion at the 34th Fair in September 1969. Phase two, from March to August 1970, completed the upper floors and erected the antenna mast. The tower opened in time for the 35th Fair in September 1970. The first black-and-white Greek network broadcasts followed from its transmitters in 1971.

Anastasiadis designed something that owes more to the optimistic futurism of mid-century modernism than to anything in Thessaloniki's older skyline. The structure is a central spire holding the elevators and emergency staircase, with five large cylindrical discs of varying diameter wrapped around it at different heights. Each disc had a function. The first floor was an office and conference room. The second, two stories tall, was an art gallery with the emergency staircase looping around its outside edge. The third was a recording studio. The fourth, the largest, holds the main observatory. The fifth, a small barrel-shaped chamber, was a live broadcasting station. Small balconies between the floors provide fire-escape platforms. The whole thing reads as machine-architecture: a piece of broadcasting equipment scaled up to the size of a building.

The fourth-floor observatory was equipped with a state-of-the-art rotating platform built by the American Rohr company, designed so seated visitors could enjoy a panoramic view that came to them rather than requiring them to walk. It still works. Today the platform houses the Skyline Cafe-Bar, which operates year-round and rotates a full circle roughly once an hour. Coffee in the morning, cocktails in the evening, the city sliding past the windows: the White Tower on the waterfront, the Galerius Arch, Mount Olympus on a clear day across the gulf to the southwest, the Thermaic Gulf opening out to the Aegean. The lower floors are off limits to the public since the 2005 renovation, except for the balcony between the third and fourth that you reach through the restaurant.

The tower stands in a city that has remade itself repeatedly. Thessaloniki was Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman for nearly five centuries. Its great fire of 1917 destroyed two-thirds of the historic center, displacing more than 70,000 people, most of them Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had arrived in 1492 after the Spanish expulsion. The Sephardic community, once the largest single group in the city, was nearly annihilated in the Holocaust. The modern city built itself in waves over the rubble. The OTE Tower is one of those waves: postwar Greece reaching for technological modernity, broadcasting the news to itself, signaling that Thessaloniki was no longer just an old Byzantine port but a forward-looking second city of a recovering republic.

Locals call it Pyrgos tou OTE, the OTE Tower, and it has become an instantly recognizable silhouette on the southern edge of the city. Cosmote, OTE's mobile-network subsidiary, still uses it for cellular antennas. The structure opens up for events and exhibitions during the annual Thessaloniki International Fair every September, the same fair it was originally built to grace. It has appeared in Greek films and in foreign productions filmed in Thessaloniki, including the 2022 American action movie The Bricklayer. It is Thessaloniki's most photographed modern building, and on a clear evening the lit-up discs against the darkening sky still look like a small city in the sky, hovering above the fairgrounds and the waiting Aegean.