Μετέωρα Audio Guide

The monastery of Saint Nicholas of Badova was founded around 1400, in a cave in the Badova rock. The stone above it hangs out like a great hood, and the builders fitted their walls into the hollow beneath. Wooden balconies jut from its face, each with a rail. Doorways sit in deep shadow. For more than five centuries it served as a monastery. In 1943, during the Second World War, the Germans bombed it. Today it is inactive, and parts of it lie in ruin. A series of ladders, passing through three caves, leads to the ruins at the south-western edge of the Meteora rocks.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The building here looks pressed into a crack between two walls of rock. Its stone storeys rise one above another. Balconies step up the narrow ledge like rungs on a ladder. Where the rock is this narrow, the building climbs rather than spreads.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The hermitage of Saint Gregory the Theologian was founded in the fourteenth century, and its ruins sit on Pyxari rock. Its hermits lived in hollows and fissures in the stone, some as high as five hundred and fifty metres above the plain. Here, timber beams are wedged into the horizontal cracks of the rock. Other beams sit in holes lower down, and boards laid across them make a floor. Posts reach down from the shelves. It is not clear when the timbers were put up. A slim ladder climbs past the lowest shelf.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Adrachti is a slim needle of rock, flanked by bulkier cliffs on either side. Because of its long, thin shape, it is sometimes called the Spindle. Its tip stands just under five hundred metres above sea level. The stone began as mud, sand and pebbles that streams carried into a delta at the edge of a lake. Over millions of years those deposits hardened into a rock called conglomerate, a mix of pebbles and sand. About sixty million years ago, earth movements pushed the ground up into a high plateau. The thick sandstone layer cracked along many vertical fault lines, which are breaks in the rock. Water, wind and extremes of temperature then wore the pillars away along those cracks. This pattern of rock and weathering is confined to a relatively small area within the surrounding mountains.

Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Saint George of Mandila is a cave high in a sheer grey cliff, about thirty metres above the ground. The cave is about fifteen metres long. At its centre it reaches four to five metres back into the rock, under the overhang. A narrow ledge runs across its mouth. Its history is uncertain. It may have been one of four monasteries founded around 1367 by Neilos, the prior of the Skete of Stagoi. It may also be the cave known as the Cave of Archimandrite Makarios, near Pigadion. The foot of the rock is easy to reach from Kastraki, but climbing is needed to reach the cave itself.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Kerchiefs hang along the narrow ledge at the mouth of this cave, in bright colours. Their name is mandilia, and they are traditionally hung at the cave entrance. Hanging a cloth at a holy place is a simple way of making an offering. A figure stands above the cloths, small against the grey stone.

Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Holy Spirit Rock, or Agion Pneuma in Greek, is a long, thin pillar with a peak rising near its middle. Houses cluster at its foot. Several sites are on it, not just one. There are the ruins of a monastery of the same name, a crevice in its cliffs known as the Monks' Prison, and the cave of Saint George of Mandila. Stylos Stagon, a rock pillar, is also part of the same complex.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A stone path leads up to a whitewashed wall and a turquoise door, set against the cliff. The path was carved into the rock itself. The church at its end has survived, though its wall paintings have decayed completely. The altar and the sacristy are carved into the stone. Just inside the entrance, a coffin is carved into the rock, where a clergyman is buried. A painted blue cross marks the stone next to the door. Two cisterns near the shrine collected rainwater.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Monks' Prison sits in a long, vertical crevice on the eastern side of Holy Spirit Rock. Rock walls close in on both sides of it. The site also goes by Oglas, and sometimes by the Nuns' Prison. Its Greek name uses the word for monks, which makes the English name Nuns' Prison a little odd. Why the place got these names is still unclear. This place may also be the Cave of Neophytos. That name is tied to the monasteries on Dupiani rock, the next stop.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 3.0

A timber ladder is fixed inside this narrow cleft, rising between two walls of stone. The crevice is so tight that the wood fills much of the gap. Poles are wedged against the rock, and rungs run across them, step by step. Above the ladder, the crevice narrows and turns dark.

Photo: Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0