Meteora

Meteora needs one planning fact: each of the six active monasteries closes on a different day of the week, and you cannot reach all six in one day. Most travellers see four. Visitors must dress modestly. Women wear skirts (long wraps are provided at the entrance if you are wearing trousers), men wear long trousers, and shoulders are covered. The dress code is enforced and is not negotiable, so cover up before the climb.

The pillars are sandstone columns, formed by long erosion of an old river delta and lifted from a Tertiary lake bed. The first hermits arrived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and climbed the rock faces for the solitude their practice required. Organised monastic communities were established by the fourteenth century. At their peak in the seventeenth century, 24 monasteries operated on the summits. Six remain active: the Great Meteoron, Varlaam, Rousanou, Saint Stephen, the Holy Trinity and Saint Nicholas Anapausas. The Great Meteoron, founded around 1340 by the monk Athanasios from Mount Athos, is the largest and the highest.

Until the 1920s, the only way into most monasteries was a removable wooden ladder or a rope basket drawn up by windlass. The basket windlass at Varlaam is still in place. As the older monks would say, the rope was changed only when the Lord let it break. Concrete steps were carved into the rock from the 1920s onwards. The frescoes in the main churches, the katholika, of Varlaam and Rousanou were painted in the sixteenth century by the Cretan school and are the artistic high point.

Kalambaka, the town at the foot of the pillars, is the obvious base for the night. Spend two nights: one full day on the monasteries, and the morning of the second on the trails. The path between Varlaam and the Great Meteoron is the most rewarding. Saint Stephen and the Holy Trinity face each other across a deep ravine and are the easier two to pair in a single afternoon.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Kalambaka is the town below the Meteora rocks. From Athens the road runs north on the A1/E75 to Lamia, then on the E65 motorway across the Thessalian plain. The drive takes four to five hours by car.

  2. The address

    Pyrgos Adrachti is a family house of 14 rooms in Kastraki, at the foot of the Adrachti rock and at the centre of the amphitheatre the pillars form. Kastraki is a better base than Kalambaka for the morning walk into the monasteries; ask for a room with the eastern view onto the rocks, with the Pindos mountains behind.

  3. Theopetra Cave

    Theopetra Cave, 3 kilometres south of Kalambaka, is a limestone chamber of 500 square metres, 300 metres above the plain. Radiocarbon dating confirms human presence there for at least 50,000 years, from the Middle Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) to the Neolithic (New Stone Age), and a low stone wall inside, dated to around 21,000 BC, is reported as the oldest known human-built structure. Systematic excavations began in 1987 under N. Kyparissi-Apostolika.

  4. The Holy Trinity

    Agia Triada, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, was built in 1475 and 1476 on the most vertiginous of the Meteora pillars, 570 metres above sea level. It is the setting of the climactic scene of the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which Roger Moore climbs the cliff to retrieve the ATAC decoder. It has the longest stair climb of the six monasteries and the fewest visitors, so do it first while your legs are fresh.

  5. Anapausas

    Saint Nicholas Anapausas is the smallest of the six monasteries. Its single-nave church was decorated in 1527 by Theophanis Strelitzas of Crete, the icon painter who became the founding figure of the post-Byzantine Cretan school, and the cycle is his first signed work. His monogram survives in the inscription above the entrance from the narthex, the church’s entrance hall, into the nave.

  6. Doupiani

    At the foot of the rocks, the church of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, still stands at Doupiani. From the late 11th century the earliest hermits gathered there on Sundays, and it was the centre of the Skete of Stagoi, the rudimentary monastic state from which Meteora grew. Hermits had lived in hollows in the rock towers from the 9th century, some 550 metres above the plain.

  7. The cathedral

    The Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos at Kalambaka was built between the 10th and 11th centuries on the ruins of an early Christian basilica. It has a triple-aisled basilica plan with a marble pulpit, unique in Greece, at its centre, and sections of the early Christian mosaic floor survive in front of the altar. The outer narthex, the entrance hall, was added in the 16th century.

  8. Tsililis

    Tsililis, at Raxa near Trikala, is the distillery the Tsililis family founded in 1989, and its tsipouro, a grape spirit, was the first bottled in Thessaly. Its vineyard covers 25 hectares of organically cultivated vines around the Meteora rocks and the Theopetra Cave. Cellar tastings are by appointment.

  9. The kitchen

    Meteora Restaurant, at Trikalon 2 in Kalambaka, opened in 1925 and has been held by the Gkertsou family for close to a century. It serves eggplant saganaki, moussaka, homemade sausage and the slow-cooked grandmother’s recipes the household has run on. It is the oldest dining room in the town and the address for a settled, traditional dinner.

  10. Trikala

    Trikala, on the Thessalian plain south of Kalambaka, is the ancient Trikke, held in antiquity to be the birthplace and main residence of Asclepius and the seat of one of the most important Asclepieia, his sanctuaries. At the foot of the fortress, the Varousi quarter keeps the Christian town of the Ottoman era in mansions of the 17th to 19th centuries and in the small churches the family lineages built from the 14th century onwards.