Meteora translates to “suspended in air,” which is not poetic license but geological fact. Massive sandstone columns rise from the Thessalian plain like the ruins of some ancient giant’s chess set, and on top of six of them sit Byzantine monasteries built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries by monks who were hauled up in nets. The engineering defies logic. The views defy description. I arrived by train from Athens — a four-hour ride through a landscape that shifts from Attic scrubland to the green Thessalian plain — and when the pillars first appeared through the window, dark and vertical against the flat farmland, I pressed my face to the glass like a child. Nothing I had seen in photographs prepared me for the sheer improbability of the formations.
The Great Meteoron is the largest and oldest, founded in the fourteenth century by Saint Athanasios, who climbed a pillar that even modern rock climbers find challenging and decided it was a good place to build a monastery. The interior is dim and heavy with the smell of incense, the frescoes darkened by centuries of candle smoke into scenes of martyrdom and resurrection that glow faintly in the gloom. The ossuary — a room of monks’ skulls and bones stacked with a neatness that is either reverent or unsettling — reminds you that this was not tourism but devotion. These men came here to be closer to God, and they chose the most literal interpretation of that ambition available.
Varlaam requires fewer stairs and offers equally staggering views across the valley. The net tower — the mechanism that hauled monks, supplies, and everything else up the sheer cliff face for centuries — is still visible, and the vertigo you feel looking down from it is enhanced by the knowledge that for hundreds of years this was the only way in. The small museum inside displays the original ropes, which are thinner than you would like them to be if your life depended on them, which it did.
For the best perspective on the formations themselves, hike the trails between monasteries at sunrise, when the rocks glow amber and the only sound is wind and distant church bells from the town of Kalambaka below. I walked the path from Great Meteoron to the Holy Trinity monastery — the one perched on the most isolated pillar, reached by a bridge carved into the rock that makes your stomach drop — and the light at seven in the morning turned the sandstone into something that looked less like geology and more like sculpture. The shadows between the pillars shifted as the sun climbed, revealing caves and ledges where hermits lived in the centuries before the monasteries were built.
Kalambaka and the smaller village of Kastraki at the base of the pillars are pleasant, unpretentious Greek towns where the tavernas serve roasted lamb and the local wine comes in carafes without labels. I ate dinner in Kastraki at a table set on a terrace directly beneath one of the great pillars, which was lit from below and loomed overhead like something from a fantasy novel. The owner brought a complimentary plate of loukoumades — honey-soaked doughnut balls — and told me that his grandfather had been one of the last monks to be hauled up by net before they built the stairs. I have no way of verifying this, but I chose to believe it.
Rock climbers come from around the world to scale the pillars, though the monks understandably prefer you use the stairs. The climbing routes are graded and bolted, but the exposure is severe — you are climbing free-standing towers with drops on every side, and the combination of physical difficulty and visual drama makes Meteora one of the most sought-after climbing destinations in Europe. I watched a pair of German climbers on a route called “The Spindle” and felt both admiration and a deep certainty that I would never follow them.
When to go: April to May for wildflowers at the base of the pillars and mild temperatures for hiking. Autumn for crisp air and morning mists threading between the rocks — the mist effect, when the pillars emerge from a sea of white cloud, is one of the most extraordinary natural spectacles in Greece.