Meteora, a small cluster of rock towers rising from the Thessaly plain, is one of those geological oddities that is far more dramatic than any cinema set designer could imagine. Meteora have inspired film directors to include it in scenes, writers, and even rockers Linkin Park. The image of these natural pillars is of a place that is distant, remote–perfect for the hermits and ascetics who retreated into their crevices and the monks who built monasteries on their pinnacles. But Diana Porter finds that Meteora and its monasteries are far more accessible than they seem.
Seeing is disbelieving. I learned this the first time I visited Meteora. I had seen pictures of the famed monasteries seeming suspended in mid-air just as the area’s name suggests as meteoros in Greek means dangling, hovering, suspended. All the pictures of Meteora that I had seen had been shot up close. The sheer cliffs and monasteries sitting atop them filled the frame. I had never seen a picture shot from afar or with a wide angle lens so my imagination had filled in the surrounding landscape, making it somehow remote and mountainous. My first glimpse of Meteora was a jolt.
We had approached by road from Trikala. I remember remarking on the terrain’s flatness to my traveling companion. It was landscape I never would have associated with Greece, where mountains or sea or both are almost always in sight. Here the land was level. Far on the horizon, something seemed to rise from the ground. It was here that we did the seemingly impossible by taking a wrong turn somewhere; now instead of approaching from the southeast, we came at Meteora from the south with a head-on view of what seemed like gigantic stalagmites piercing an otherwise flat horizon. To be honest, their sight, from this distance and angle, didn’t inspire awe but rather an inadvertent guffaw, so outlandish did these rocks seem looming over the town of Kalambaka. I checked my guidebook; the Meteora rise about 300 meters, reaching 400 meters on some peaks. From a distance, amid the flatness, and compared to the Pindos massif on the far horizon, these cliffs gave the landscape the incongruity of a science fiction film. There are countless rocks–by one source as many as a thousand which, it has been alluded, some of the early monks counted in prayer as if some gigantic nature-made komboskini–but from afar they seem like no more than two or three. As we closed the distance, their proportions improved as the scale of our visual field changed. By the time we drove into Kalambaka, the surrounding plains were forgotten as the Meteora imposed their presence.
Kalambaka might seem an unremarkable town but it is quite remarkable, if only for the fact that it sits so comfortably at the Meteora’s feet. Strolling its streets, the sense of incongruity returns as the rocks’ peaks poke over rather dull-looking modern buildings or in the gaps between awnings shading cafes, tavernas, and other stores lining its streets. There doesn’t seem to be much to explore in Kalambaka or in the smaller, adjacent Kastraki, but that’s only if you perhaps arrive impatient to reach Meteora so have little time to devote to the town in their shadows.
Meteora is at its finest in spring. There’s little vegetation but the air’s crispness and the rays of the vernal sun bathe the rocks in a feeling of lightness. Orthodox Easter is, of course, celebrated in spring and a sense of reverence fills the air. I’ve always wanted to visit during Holy Week.
It’s hard to imagine Meteora without its monasteries. The natural setting is so splendid and inspires such awe at whatever force created it that it lends itself to meditation or prayer. It is by itself a place that inspires faith–and even cynics or agnostics admit to being overcome by a feeling of veneration as they peer over the cliffs.
When the monasteries were built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there were no roads leading into the Meteora. Building materials were transported by foot or hoisted up in lift-baskets–which remained the basic access to the monasteries for centuries. Today there are roads that lead from Kalambaka to the monasteries and join them in the six that have survived of the original twenty-four in a circuit-like route. But the best way to reach Meteora, for the hardy at least, is by foot path from the upper reaches of Kalambaka to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity (Ayia Triada) and the Holy Monastery of St Stephen (Ayios Stefanos). It’s a strenuous hike, yet realizing it’s the same one used by the early monks and pilgrims to reach their monasteries somehow keeps one going–that thought, a thermos of coffee, a bottle of water, some fruit and nuts to snack on and the gorgeous views. You get a similar, albeit not exactly the same, feeling trudging from monastery to monastery over foot paths rather than by car–a far milder activity than scaling the rocks as the more adventurous (and trained) do.
The two largest monasteries–the Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron and the Holy Monastery of Varlaam–attract the most visitors. Megalo Meteoro was founded in the fourteenth century by a monk from Mount Athos. It’s also known as the Monastery of the Transfiguration of Christ after its katholikon, or main church. It’s a sprawling compound, with an infrastructure that includes library, infirmary, large kitchens, refectory, and cistern. The architecture is impressive, like the double-vaulted refectory and domed, cross-vaulted hospital. Icons and manuscripts, some dating from the ninth century, add to the attraction of visitors seeking a “tour experience”. Varlaam, which faces Megalo Meteoro, is slightly smaller but has a more intriguing history as it was founded by two wealthy merchant brothers from Ioannina in memory of an ascetic, Varlaam, who first scaled the pillar–and died there. Here it’s not the icons or architecture that is the main draw, but the steps carved into the rock that were used to reach the monastery in the centuries before pilgrims could simply drive up to the entrance in their air-conditioned cars. The steps were a labor of necessity: the earlier system for reaching the monastery–wood ladders strung together with rope–had proved quite precarious.
Yet my favorite is the smaller Monastery of Saint Nicholas Anapafsas–the first on the road from Kastraki and also at the end of a footpath from this village. It seems to balance atop a pillar and it’s precisely this precariousness that fills me with a sense of wonder. With less room to spread, its architecture is almost perpendicular, with the katholikon squeezed between the monastery’s main chamber and a smaller chapel above and its nave lodged into the limestone. This small church is almost always immersed in darkness, even on the sunniest spring day, and this adds to the sense of sanctity permeating this small compound. With fewer people around, I can revel in the sense of solitude that Meteora’s founders sought as respite from their worldly lives and examine, at my leisure, the lovely, delicate frescoes painted by a monk from Crete, Theofanis Strelitzas.
But it’s the monastery’s name I find most appealing. Saint Nicholas Anapafsas. It’s also intriguing as there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about Nicholas and the epithet attached to this particular saint. Anapafsi in Greek means rest, but it’s also a euphemism for death: anapaftike or “he has rested” is a phrase commonly used by Greeks when someone has passed on. Was Nicholas a monk who died here? Was the saint somehow linked to eternal rest? Over the years I’ve developed my own version: it’s a more literal, if not literary, meaning and one that reflects what I seek from Meteora. Rest, repose. serenity–a few moments where I can suspend the anxiety of day to day living and breathe in the pure air of the Meteora.
A three-kilometer stretch of the Thessaly plain separates Meteora from Theopetra, an awkwardly shaped limestone mound that sits on the flat landscape like a boil. For years Theopetra barely rated a glance from the tourists rushing towards Meteora; today some stop to visit the cave where archaeologists literally discovered traces of prehistoric man–footprints dated to at least 46,000 years. This find, made in the late 1990s by Greek archaeologists who had been probing the cave for over a decade may have been the archaeological discovery of the century for Greece. Footprints, those simple traces humans leave on soil or sand, may seem common but they are the rarest archaeological find. Thanks to the Theopetra cave’s unique geology and its moisture, the impression was preserved for millennia. Two human skeletons–a man, dated from around 14,500 B.C., and a woman, dated between 7050 and 7010 B.C.–have also been excavated in the cave, along with artifacts like tools and jewelry. Archaeologists also found other imporant evidence in the Theopetra cave: the oldest known example of a man-made structure–a 23,000-year-old stone wall blocking most of the cave’s entrance.
It’s been just two years since the cave was opened to the public–and that access was interrupted for several months after excavations yielded new finds. Theopetra was reopened last October and is well worth the slight detour. The hill that forms the cave’s exterior may be non-descript, but the cavern is quite impressive–a massive chamber with a three-meter high entrance and a second, elongated chamber with an area of roughly 500 square meters.
Excavations at Theopetra were begun in 1987. Finding evidence that it had been inhabited almost continuously for millennia seems logical in hindsight given that even in modern times the cave had been used–by shepherds as a shelter at the time archaeologists began their digs and in the second world war as a hideout for resistance fighters. There’s some speculation that the caves may have been the base for Meteora’s skete community before they went to roost in the fissures of Meteora’s cliffs sometime during the ninth century. It is possible.
There’s also speculation about the origin of the word skete itself. Some say it’s derived from the Egyptian valley where the first of these monastic communities were founded; others say it derives from the Greek for ascetic, asketes, from askisis or exercise–as in the exercise of abstinence and the pursuit of the spiritual over the worldly. Since the dawn of Christianity, asceticism found strong appeal among converts and many took to the deserts of the Middle East and Northern Africa to seek the isolation they needed to discipline body and soul. In Greece, with its rugged terrain, the ascetics took to the mountains and the isolation offered by the scores of caverns and caves riddling their exteriors. Meteora proved ideal.
Meteora is a group of sandstone pillars formed by a combination of seismic activity and flooding hundreds of thousands of years ago. Curiously, although ancient texts allude to a sea existing where the Thessaly plain is now, they make no mention of these incredible rocks. Could it be that they’re more recent? Science and history, as related through ancient sources, diverge here for one of the most significant conclusions from the evidence found at Theopetra is of a continuous human presence in the area for some 50,000 years and that the Neolithic settlers weren’t migrants but that their culture evolved there.
It’s this combination of natural and human creation that earned Meteora a place on the Unesco list of World Heritage Sites as “a unique artistic achievement” and “one of the most powerful examples of the architectural transformation of a site into a place of retreat, meditation, and prayer.” This importance dates before the monasteries, to the ascetics themselves, as Meteora is an outstanding example of early Christianity’s eremitic ideals, as Unesco points out.
The ascetics’ isolation is almost total: interaction is limited to other ascetics and only to share resources through monastic communities known as sketes. Pock-faced mountains like the Meteora are ideal for sketes as there are enough crevices and caves for ascetics to use as cells–always separate, as the point is isolation–as well as a shared cell that serves as a small church.
One of the first ascetics to settle here was Barnabas, who formed the skete of the Holy Spirit at Meteora. It was the first of several sketes, or ascetic communities, as his example was followed by Andronicos, a monk from Crete, on the cusp of the eleventh century and later a miniscule skete state whose traces remain south of the Doupiani rock. Ascetics, in fact, gave Meteora their name sometime in the fourteenth century, around the time the Monastery of the Transfiguration of Christ was founded.