Discover Kala Nera
and Pelion

In Greece the typical classy things happen mostly in the south. Further north you find predominantly landscape – among that the Olymp which is at 2917m the home of the gods and of the Greek Alpine Association. In middle Greece, more or less in the upper middle of Thessaly far away from any big city you find the METEORA MONASTERIES (TA METEORA MONASTIRIA = “the monasteries floating in the sky “). They belong to the most important Byzantine sights of Greece.
The monasteries were built on steep freestone rocks which tower up about 300 m from a plateau of the Pinios. These rocks owe their appearance to a huge lake which extended here in the tertiary. After the lifting of the land he small rivers ate away the rocks and that way created the canyons between the now separated rocks. The first monasteries emerges from the hermitages as refuge and prayer site at the beginning of the 14th century in a time which was defined by fights between the Serbian realm and the Byzantine Empire. In the year 1356 the control of the monks was passed over from the Bishop of SATGOI to the abbot of the monastery DUPANI. A little later the monk Athanasios founded the monastery METAMORPHOSIS on the broad rock (Platis Lithos). During the following centuries new monasteries followed until the 16th century. Conflicts about demesne, poverty and the therefor necessary selling of monastery treasures let to a come down: Only five of the originally 23 monasteries are inhabited.
Formerly you could reach the monasteries (by the was, it was strictly forbidden to women to enter) only through ladders or you could be pulled up by nets. Today asphaltic paths and stairs facilitate the access a lot, more so as it i said that the nets were renewed only when they broke while pulling somebody up. A macabre thought for the inquisitive tourists.
Two of the monasteries dispose of beds for visitors. In the biggest, MEGALO METEORON, the Greek central for tourism set up a hotel. If you want to spent a unusual night at a unusual place you can do so here. On the road for cars you first pass by the small former Metropolis church Dupani which emerged from a older Mary chapel. It s overhung by a very tiny rock stick with the collapsed ruins of the DUPANI and PANTOKRATOR monasteries. Further west the monastery AGIOS NIKOLA0S (around 1390) rises.
VAARLAM, founded in 1517 has very nice frescos which were painted by Frankos Kastellanos from Thebes. The monastery MEGALO METEORON which is the biggest and highest emerged between 1356 and 1372 as the METAMORPHOSIS monastery which in that time from 1388 on was first extended by the Serbian crown prince and later monk Josaph and that way it got the centre of the monk community. Worth seeing are the church METAMORPHOSIS (frescos of 1438 in the Chorapsis and also a picture of the founder of the monastery Athanasios from 1338; in the proper church room, 1549-52, also frescos, 16th century and very worth seeing icons, 14th till 16 century, the refectory (1557) and the library.