Trifter

Meteora Monasteries are located in a high, isolated and inaccessible part of Greece, near Kalabaka in the central region of Thessaly. These old monasteries are perched right at the top of rock pinnacles which look impossible to reach, let alone perch a building on.

The word ‘meteora’ means ‘in the air’ and these buildings really are as high up in the air as it is possible to get in this region. 

The idea was to build them as close to heaven as it was possible to get them. Some of the rocky pinnacles on which they are built are up to 1800 feet, or 549 metres above the ground.

They are situated on the very edge of the Pindus Mountains and they overlook the beautiful Pinions Valley. This was the only view most of the monks had of the outside world because many of them, once they had entered the monastery, spent their entire lives there.

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Traditionally, Christian ascetics hid themselves away in high and remote places and in this case it is the Greek Orthodox monks who first built the monasteries and settled in these wild mountainous places around 1350.  Life in a Meteora monastery was hard and very simple. There were a few minute cells for the monks to sleep in, a church, a refectory where they ate and a cistern which was cut into the rock face to collect the rainwater.  If rainfall was low, water was in short supply, but fortunately this area does have a very high annual rainfall.

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Even into the twentieth century, anyone who wanted to visit one of these monasteries clinging to the mountain top like an eagle’s nest had to climb up a rickety rope ladder which was secured to the rock face, or even have the hair raising experience of sitting in a basket which was then manually hauled up the mountain side.

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During the nineteenth century adventurers started to visit these mountain monasteries more often but they were still very difficult to get to and it was not until after 1960, when a new access road was built through the area that visitor numbers increased dramatically and this turned into a tourist area.

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The sad part about this is that many of the monks have had to move away in order to maintain their privacy and the very tiny communities left behind are now more like museum keepers than monks in monasteries.

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