Hiking Meteora

After Delphi, we drove through long, windy, mountainous roads, made worse by dense fog, but in the end it was worth it, as we ended up in the town of Kastraki, nestled in the spectacular landscape of the Meteora mountains, which literally means “mountains floating in the air” and is where we get the name “meteor.”

But if the landscape, wasn’t enough, we also had an opportunity to hike around and visit the monasteries and convents of Meteora, which as you can see are all perched high above on these amazing geologic formations.

If this looks familiar, its because the whole area has been an inspiration for things like 007 movies (For your eyes only), Game of Thrones and Avatar. They’re really amazing, mostly abandoned now, but a few still remain occupied, giving monks and nuns an opportunity to get away from it all since about the 1500s. This last one just below, was where monks went to when they wanted to get away from all the other monks, apparently they got seven days vacation a year to hang out here!

Here’s some photos from the early 20th Century where you can see how the monks lived prior to the arrival of electricity, when they still needed to get everything into the monasteries by pulley, including themselves!

The monasteries and convents themselves were really beautiful, and as I mentioned, looked straight off scenes from Game of Thrones. Remember, everything here was hauled up by pulley!

The other nice to notice is how empty it is. Even though the temperature was a comfortable 10c/50f there was virtually no tourists around, whereas in the height of the tourist season, traffic jams approaching the monasteries can last up to two hours!

We avoided all that by hiking around the monasteries, guided by local hiker, Evan. It was amazing to hear about all the local history, fighting the Ottomans and how the monasteries were frequently used as refuge.

While we were hiking we could hear in the distance the ringing of bells, and sure enough before long we came across a Shepard and her herd of sheep!

The area was also rich in mushrooms. This first one was really strange, when you pressed the mushroom is expelled a noxious dust from the hole in the top of the mushroom to keep predators away and stop them from eating it. The local name for this mushroom literally means “Wolf’s fart”!

But the real star of the show was those amazing mountains formed millions of years ago when the area was a delta into a lake. We hiked past all the monasteries, and walked all the way up to the very first monastery that was formed in the early 1400s, making a final climb up a very steep part to the top of one of the mountains.

Here’s the door to the very first monastery and below it the interior. Every year the villagers hike up to this spot to maintain it and then climb to the very top of the mountain to ring the bell. It really was an amazing place to visit, with a landscape like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Just to give you a sense of how high we went, this is the view of the spot we were above, when viewed from the village, if you zoom in really close you can see the white cross we were holding onto for dear life!

Here it is marked in yellow!