Thursday, 5th September 2013. Meteora Monasteries

We arrived back after (for once) a perfectly timed journey - plane, bus, coach, hire car to boat. All by the civilised hour of 5.30pm. The car (hired for 2 days) had a threefold purpose. Get us and our luggage from Volos Coach station to Pefkakia Boatyard, enable us to do a major shop at outlying supermarkets, and most importantly, give us a day inland to go and explore the amazing Meteora area.

First, the drive to Meteora. We have discovered a new way of interpreting overtaking rules (lines, lanes, etc). Where there is a dotted line, one straddles the line slightly, erring towards one's preferred own lane. This enables one to overtake or be overtaken by pulling back more obviously into the correct lane (or not). Not much difference to rest of the world here. But where there is a double line (no overtaking), the nearside car ditch crawls and straddles the hard shoulder, thus enabling those wishing to go faster to overtake regardless of double lines by only crossing them ever so slightly. Very sensible! But the Greeks (charming though they may be) are still Europe's worst drivers.

And so to Meteora. The area consists of sandstone and conglomerate pillars or towers (translated as "suspended rocks". There are about 1,000 vertiginous rocks (about 985 ft high) described as a "forest of stone" rising unexpectedly out of the flat plain of Thessaly with the Pindos mountain range the other side of the plain. Water from the River Peneus formed a closed lake, that then forced its way through an opening of the Tempe and created the weird structures. They are apparently unique and according to many, one of the world's great wonders. A haunt of vultures - could I spot one though?

It has always been a religious and cultural centre from early classical Greek era through to Roman period. Hermits came in the 10th /11th C and lived in caves in the rocks. They climbed up by ropes and pegs hammered into the rock. They began to organise themselves and by 14th C proper hermitages and monasteries were built - each perched high on the pinnacle of one of the rocks. The first and biggest was Megalo Meteora. Eventually there were 24, with 6 surviving and in active use today.

They built them by carrying building material up by hand (rope ladders that dangled over fresh air) or by hoist - nets and baskets that were hauled up by manual winches on top. People (the wimps who bottled out from using the rope ladders) were also hauled up by these nets. These were still in use until the 1920's when steps were cut into the rocks enabling visitors to climb up. Occasionally a visiting monk will still be hauled up by net. Now there are also roads snaking up the hills, so we had the easy option. Good walking country though.

We visited inside 4 of the 6 monasteries and walked to the other two for the views. How one could achieve inner contemplation with those staggering views is anyone's guess. They really had a bird's eye view of the world and all you could do was gawp. Staggering. The monasteries themselves were richly decorated with rather gruesome frescoes, mostly by a Cretan artist monk and his followers, depicting graphic examples of persecution, martyrdom, lots of stabbing, cutting off of heads, bleached bones, animal grotesques, etc as well as the more recognisable religious iconography.

An amazing place, for the geology as well as the monasteries, if ever you are remotely near, make the effort to go and visit. Glad we did!

We launch the boat today and will be off. The sun is shining, and we should be in the water in half an hour. So better get this loaded up. Next stop ?