Meteora

Interesting facts

The pillars are not volcanic but sandstone and conglomerate, laid down in a river delta and later uplifted and split by faults some 60 million years ago.

In nearby Theopetra Cave a stone wall built about 23,000 years ago, probably against Ice Age winds, is among the oldest known human-made structures.

In 1921 Queen Marie of Romania became the first woman ever allowed inside the Great Meteoron.

As the story goes, the ropes used to haul monks and pilgrims up in nets were replaced only when the Lord let them break.

At Varlaam two brothers spent twenty-two years hoisting materials up the rock, yet the building itself reportedly went up in about twenty days.

At its height in the 16th century the Great Meteoron housed more than 300 monks.

A Serbian-Greek ruler, John Uroš, gave up his throne in 1373 and lived out his life as a monk at the Meteoron.

The pillars survived a magnitude 7 earthquake in 1954 without collapsing.

The Holy Trinity monastery was a filming location for the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, and Linkin Park named a 2003 album after Meteora.

St Stephen's became a convent in 1961, and its main church of 1798 is the youngest of all the Meteora monastery churches.

Why it is worth it

Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them. It took until the 14th century for that scattered hermit life to organize into something institutional, when the monk Athanasios arrived from Mount Athos and founded the Great Meteoron on the tallest of the pillars.

Everything that followed had to be hauled up by hand: stone, timber, food, and eventually the monks themselves, using nets, hand-cranked winches and retractable ladders. Some of the two dozen monasteries built here took two or three generations of monks to complete — men who started the work and died long before it was finished, without ever seeing the result from the top.

Steps weren't cut into the rock until the 1920s, ending nearly six centuries in which the only way up was by rope or net. Of the original two dozen religious houses, six survive today, and Meteora holds a genuinely rare distinction — inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988 for both its natural rock formations and its monastic architecture, a dual cultural-and-natural listing shared by only a handful of sites worldwide.

Getting there

21 km from Tríkala. Kozani National Airport Filippos (KZI) is about 66 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Meteora is a rock formation in the regional unit of Trikala, in Thessaly, in northwestern Greece, hosting one of the most prominent complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries, viewed locally as second in importance only to Mount Athos. Their height is more than 20 metres (66 ft).

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Meteora

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia