Full Day To Meteora

They are what UNESCO calls the natural half of the site, and they are the reason the rest of it exists.

Sixty million years ago this was a river delta. The sediment compacted into conglomerate — pebbles set in sandstone, like poured concrete — and then the ground rose and the softer material eroded away, leaving several hundred pillars standing free on the floor of the Thessalian plain, some of them three hundred metres tall, with vertical faces and flat tops.

Nothing about them is subtle. You come around a bend below Kalambaka and they are simply there, grey and enormous and completely unlike anything around them. It is the single most photographed landscape in Greece after Santorini, and unlike Santorini it is not crowded.

They are also one of Europe’s great climbing grounds, bolted since the 1970s and still working.

Hermits were living in the caves and fissures by the eleventh century, hauling themselves up on ropes to be left alone. What changed it was Athanasios, a scholar-monk out of Mount Athos, who arrived around 1333 and by about 1340 had founded a proper community on the Broad Rock — the Great Meteoron.

The lineage is direct: Athos taught Athanasios, Athanasios built Meteora, and Meteora became the second monastic centre of the Orthodox world. He brought the Athonite rule with him. It is why this place looks and works the way it does.

His successor was a former Serbian emperor who had given up the throne to become a monk here, and who paid for the church. By the sixteenth century twenty-four monasteries crowned the pillars, at a moment when the Ottoman conquest had made an inaccessible rock the safest address in Greece. Then came three centuries of decline, bombing and looting in the Second World War, and what survived is six.

Great Meteoron is the oldest and largest, on the highest of the accessible rocks — a katholikon with sixteenth-century frescoes, a refectory, a library holding 610 manuscripts, and an ossuary where the skulls of past monks are stacked in rows and labelled. Varlaam is the second largest, re-founded in 1517, and it has the windlass tower. Rousanou sits low and is the easiest to reach, a convent now, so compact that the building seems to have grown out of the rock rather than been placed on it. St Nicholas Anapafsas, St Stephen and Holy Trinity complete the six.