The Monasteries of Meteora

Meteora is a forest of sandstone pillars rising out of the Thessalian plain, and for seven centuries monastics have lived on top of them. Hermits reached the summits in the fourteenth century, and the great building age followed in the sixteenth, when the monasteries were constructed with the materials hauled up in nets by the same ropes their inhabitants used. Twenty-four monasteries were eventually built on the rocks; six survive as active communities today, and each is a working monastery of the Greek Orthodox Church, with monks at the Great Meteoron and Varlaam, nuns at Roussanou and St Stephen, and the rest of the complex's history scattered in ruins on the other pinnacles.

Visiting is a matter of the community's terms, and the terms are specific. Entry is five euros per monastery in cash; each of the six closes on a different weekday, so the weekends are the only days all of them open, and winter brings extra closing days; the municipality's guide warns plainly that hours change with little notice. The dress code is Orthodox monastic standard: covered shoulders, skirts below the knee for women, long trousers for men, with spare skirts at the gates. Inside, the churches hold post-Byzantine frescoes and photography is usually not allowed. The honest frame is that this is not a ruin site with admission; it is a living monastic landscape that permits visitors inside its homes on the communities' schedule.

Visiting

The Great Meteoron's official visit page carries its schedule, and the municipality's guide lists all six monasteries' rotating closing days; five euros each, cash.

Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Meteoron_Monastery_04.jpg))