October 28, 2022 Meteora GR

Meteora was on my list of places of visit to Greece, but while we were in Albania Mugi from the campground in Durres insisted we visit here. We are really glad we did as it is one of the most striking places we have ever been.

The columns of rocks in the valley would be incredible by themselves. I did some research on how they were formed. The answer was complicated, but what is special is that individual rocks like this are not that uncommon, but what is unusual about Meteora is that there are only a couple of other places where they are clustered together like this.

The rocks are awe inspiring and early on attracted spiritual people. There are caves in the limestone cliffs that attracted Chrisitian hermits early in the development of Christianity.

As time went on the hermits began to form into groups and found monasteries on top of the rocks. At the peak in the mid to late 1400’s there were over 26 monasteries perched on top of rock faces in the area.

Part of the reason was religious as the area does have a spiritual pull. The other reason was during the 1400’s this area was under a lot of pressure from the Ottoman Empire so the rock peaks gave security to the monks.

Many were only accessible by rope and pulley so the monks were quite isolated from the surrounding towns and valleys. The monasteries required incredible ingenuity and labor to complete.

Today we visited four of the six remaining monasteries. Now two of the monasteries have been converted to nunneries, so it is actually two nunneries and four monasteries. In modern times a good road runs thru the mountains and all of the monasteries have carved staircases to them so while it is still quite a climb to most of the monasteries they are very accessible. As a result they have become the second most visited tourist destination on mainland Greece.

They are not very large but all include a chapel and living quarters. Our favorite one the Monastery of Varlaam had a couple of small but really well done museums on site. We were lucky to get into Varlaam as it is usually closed on Fridays but was open today because it is a Greek national holiday. Because everyone assumed it was closed when Ton and I got there we had the place nearly to ourselves. Ton had to buy a skirt to cover her pants. As you walk up there is a sign saying men cannot wear shorts and women cannot wear halter tops, shorts or pantaloons.

The views from the monasteries were incredible, but the chapels were also quite interesting. Ton was really fascinated by the icons in the chapels and found them quite beautiful.

Later in the day we visited the Holy Trinity Monastery which was used in the James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only.” It is the smallest of the monasteries but the hardest climb.

Meteora is a special place and we both really enjoyed it. One of the highlights was our bus driver, we were using a shuttle service provided by the town and had the same bus driver all day. On one of the legs we were the only ones on the bus and he waved us to the front seat so he could talk as he was squeezing thru incredibly narrow spaces. Today is Liberation Day in Greece so I asked who they were liberated from and he said the Turks, but after a few seconds he said no it was the Germans and Italians, he then laughed and said we’ve been liberated a lot so it can get confusing.