We said good bye to our great little Thessaloniki apartment this morning. Meteora is our next stop.
We took the highway to Meteora and with several coffee stops it took about 3 hours. We also stopped to take pictures of what we thought was Mt. Olympus but now we are not so sure it was Mt. Olympus.
Meteora is famous because it has monasteries perched on immense rock pillars. We were driving through the mountains and kept waiting to see the pillars but it wasn’t until we were practically in Meteora that we saw the rock formations. According to Wikipedia they are particularly unique because the pillars are so localized. The ancients believed these formations to be meteors hurled by an angry god. If you are interested you can read about their formation on Wikipedia.
We arrived in Meteora around lunch time. We checked into our hotel (no Airbnb because we are only here one night) and had a lovely lunch overlooking this amazing landscape.
After lunch we drove to the monasteries. Our first stop wasn’t a monastery but actually a nunnery. We hiked up the stairs and paid the entrance fee. Only 16 nuns live there. Only the church and some of the common spaces were accessible to tourists. We couldn’t see any of their living space so it only took about 15 minutes to walk through. The chapel was beautiful but we couldn’t take pictures and I couldn’t find any on the internet.
Next we went to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity. Only two monks live there. It was featured in the 1981 James Bond move, For Your Eyes Only. We had to walk down a path, through a tunnel, and then up about 180 steps, it took us about 1/2 hr to get up there. The monastery was bigger than the nunnery but again we weren’t allowed in the living spaces. They had a nice garden and the views from the garden were amazing.
We also stopped at several viewing sites, climbed out on the rocks and took pictures. All in all it really is an amazing location. I highly recommend it to anyone coming to Greece. Here are pictures from our day.
This evening we returned to the hotel, relaxed and planned our trip to Delphi tomorrow.