Meteora: the monasteries that defy gravity

When the monks living in the crevices and caves of Meteora first decided to build on top of the rock columns, they had no ladders. They used ropes and nets. The materials for the first monasteries — shaped stone, timber, icons — went up the same way. The inaccessibility was not a problem to be solved. It was the point. The harder it was to reach, the more complete the separation from the world.

This principle, which sounds medieval because it is, explains one of the most improbable geographies in the Mediterranean. Meteora, in northern Thessaly, is the result of two processes that have nothing to do with each other: one geological, sixty million years old, and one spiritual, from the fourteenth century. Together they produced something with no equivalent anywhere else.

The geology that made it possible

The rock pillars of Meteora formed from sediments deposited on the floor of a prehistoric lake during the Palaeocene and Eocene epochs. Over millions of years, those sediments hardened and were elevated with the tectonic plate. Then water and wind erosion excavated the softer material, leaving standing the columns of harder conglomerate. The result is roughly forty rock formations between sixty and four hundred metres tall, with their distinctive vertical silhouettes, clustered within a few square kilometres.

What makes Meteora different from other spectacular rock formations — Cappadocia, the American Southwest — is the combination of that vertical scale with a fertile valley floor below. The town of Kalambaka sits at the foot of the rocks. The contrast between the red-tiled houses, the olive groves, the Greek Orthodox bell towers, and the vertical columns rising four hundred metres behind them is completely absurd. And for exactly that reason, completely memorable.

The hermits and the builders

The first ascetics arrived at Meteora in the eleventh century, drawn by the geographical impossibility of the place. They lived in crevices and caves in the rock faces. Greek Orthodox eremitic life had a precise logic: withdrawal from the world was the condition for drawing closer to God. The less accessible the place, the lower the temptation, the fewer the distractions.

The monasteries that stand today date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first and largest, Megalo Meteoro (the Great Meteoron), was founded by the monk Athanasios Meteorites around 1340. Construction meant bringing materials to summits with no access path. The nets and ropes used to lift monks and visitors were not replaced by stone stairs until the twentieth century. Before that, anyone wishing to visit the monasteries depended on the monks’ willingness to work the windlass. There was a saying: the ropes were changed “when God ordained it” — meaning when they broke.

The six that remain

At their peak, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Meteora housed twenty-four monasteries. Decline came through wars, earthquakes, and above all the difficulty of sustaining communities in such inaccessible places. Today six remain.

Megalo Meteoro is the highest (613 metres above sea level) and the most visited. Varlaam, the second in size, preserves a sixteenth-century wooden cylinder that was the original windlass mechanism. Roussanou, perched on a rock of almost impossibly narrow profile, houses a community of nuns. Agios Nikolaos Anapafsas has the most extraordinary frescoes, the work of the Cretan painter Theophanis Strelitzas in the sixteenth century. Agia Triada — the Holy Trinity — appeared in the closing sequence of the 1981 Bond film “For Your Eyes Only”: the staircase carved directly into the rock that descends from the monastery is entirely real. Agios Stefanos, the most accessible (connected to the road by a bridge), is now a convent.

The four active monasteries have very few residents: the total monastic community of Meteora numbers fewer than twenty people. Tourist visits are the principal source of income and the principal tension: these are active places of worship receiving millions of visitors annually.

Getting it right

Meteora received UNESCO World Heritage status in 1988, one of the few mixed (natural and cultural) nominations in the world. This does not reduce the crowds: in summer, the monastery car parks fill before ten in the morning and organised tour groups plan their visit schedules like interlocking puzzle pieces.

The way to escape this is to stay in Kalambaka or, better, in the immediately adjacent village of Kastraki, which has the most iconic view of the whole complex at sunset. With a car, the monasteries are five to twelve minutes away. Opening hours vary by monastery and day of the week — not all are open every day — and it is essential to check before planning the route. A minimum of two days allows all six to be visited comfortably, including the quieter hours: early morning or late afternoon, before closing.

The monasteries require appropriate dress: long skirts or a sarong over trousers for women, long trousers for men, shoulders covered. Some monasteries lend fabric at the entrance. Entry to each costs between €2 and €4.

No photograph of Meteora conveys the scale well. Images make everything relatively abstract: rocks, buildings, landscape. In person, standing at the base of a four-hundred-metre pillar with a monastery on top, scale is what hits hardest. Not the beauty, which is real. The sheer physical improbability of it all.

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