Meteora Monasteries: What to Know

1. The Rocks and the Name

Meteora is a cluster of natural rock pillars in Thessaly, central Greece, rising directly out of the plain above the town of Kalabaka and the village of Kastraki, with Eastern Orthodox monasteries built on the flat summits of several of them. Six of those monasteries are still inhabited by monks or nuns and can be entered by visitors. The word Meteora is Greek and means suspended in the air, or lifted above, and it was applied first to one rock and then to the whole formation.

The pillars are conglomerate: a mass of pebbles and sand cemented together, laid down by rivers running into an older basin, then raised and cut apart by water, frost and wind until only the hardest columns were left standing. The surfaces are pocked with hollows and shallow caves, which matters for the history, because those hollows are where the first Christian ascetics lived. The tops are not sharp. Several of them are broad, level and large enough for a church, a refectory, cells, a cistern and a garden, which is exactly what was built on them.

The geological description above follows the standard published account of the site, including the summary given by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which inscribed Meteora on the World Heritage List in 1988 under both cultural and natural criteria. This page gives no figure for the age or the height of the rocks, because published figures vary with the method and the pillar measured.

Where the name came from

The tradition recorded by the monasteries themselves attributes the name to Saint Athanasios the Meteorite, a monk who settled one of the broad pillars in the fourteenth century and called it the Meteoron, the rock lifted up. The name attached to his foundation, then to the whole group. Greek speakers still distinguish the Great Meteoron, meaning that one monastery, from Meteora, meaning the entire cluster of rocks and the houses on them.

Kalabaka below

The town at the foot of the rocks, Kalabaka, was the seat of the old bishopric of Stagoi, and its Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos is a Byzantine building older than any of the monasteries above it, with a marble pulpit standing in the middle of the nave in an arrangement that had already become unusual elsewhere. Meteora sat directly above a diocesan town from the first, a set of hermitages and monasteries within reach of the bishop of Stagoi, who is part of the story throughout.

2. The Hermits Who Came First

Ascetics were living in the caves and clefts of the rocks at Meteora well before any community was organised on a summit, and the physical evidence is still on the cliffs: cut footholds, beam sockets, walled-up cave mouths, and small wooden platforms wedged into fissures that could only ever have been reached by ladder or rope. Some of these hermitages were occupied into modern times.

The hermit is the older Christian form. Men went out to the Egyptian desert in the third and fourth centuries to pray without interruption, and the pattern travelled through the Byzantine world wherever the ground allowed it. Meteora allowed it very well. A cleft in a vertical face is defensible, quiet, and impossible to reach without help, which suited both the ascetic purpose and, later, a dangerous century.

The skete of Doupiani

The hermits did not live in complete isolation from one another. A loose community formed around a church of the Theotokos at Doupiani, at the foot of the rocks, where the scattered ascetics came together on Sundays and feast days for the Divine Liturgy and then returned to their own caves. A senior monk, the protos, presided over the gathering. This arrangement, a set of solitaries attached to a common church, is what Orthodox tradition calls a skete, and it is the middle term between the hermit alone and the fully communal monastery. Doupiani is where Meteora begins as an organised Christian settlement.

3. The Fourteenth Century Foundations

The monasteries proper begin in the fourteenth century, and the central figure is Saint Athanasios the Meteorite. He had been a monk on Mount Athos, and he came to Thessaly and settled on the broad, level pillar called the Broad Rock, around the middle of the century. He built a small church there, gathered a community, and gave them a coenobitic rule of the kind he had known on Athos. His foundation, the Monastery of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, is the Great Meteoron, and the monasteries' own published histories and the Holy Metropolis of Stagoi and Meteora describe it as the largest of the houses.

Ioasaph, a ruler who became a monk

The second founder of the Great Meteoron was John Uros Palaiologos, son of Symeon Uros, who ruled in Thessaly and Epirus during the Serbian expansion into northern Greece. He gave up his position, took the monastic name Ioasaph, and entered the community under Athanasios, whom he succeeded. He rebuilt and endowed the monastery, and the older sanctuary of the present main church dates from his work at the end of the fourteenth century. Both Athanasios and Ioasaph are venerated as saints by the Orthodox Church, and their memory is kept at the monastery they built.

Why anyone would build up there

Two reasons pull in the same direction. The ascetic reason is the older one: height, silence and difficulty of access serve a life meant to be undivided. The practical reason is fourteenth century Thessaly, which was fought over by Byzantine, Serbian, Catalan and then Ottoman forces in quick succession, and where a community holding books, relics and liturgical silver had good cause to put a hundred metres of vertical rock between itself and the road. A monastery reached only by a ladder that can be pulled up is a monastery that survives a bad decade.

Foundations multiplied through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period when most of the buildings and nearly all of the surviving paintings were made. Then the numbers fell. Houses were abandoned as endowments failed, as populations moved, and later through the damage and looting of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. What is left is six inhabited monasteries and a scattering of ruins on rocks that carry no path at all.

The figure usually published for the number of foundations at the height of the settlement is twenty-four. That count comes from the standard accounts of the site and from the monasteries' own published histories, and it varies between authors according to whether ruined sketes and single hermitages are counted as foundations. This page reports the figure as the published one rather than as a verified total.

4. The Six Houses Still Active

Six monasteries at Meteora are inhabited and open. Four are men's houses and two are convents of nuns. The distinction matters at the gate, because a convent is a community of nuns living the same monastic life under an abbess, and the visitor is entering the enclosure of women who live there.

Dedications, foundation and refoundation accounts, the dates of the fresco cycles and the dates at which Roussanou and Saint Stephen became convents are as published by the monasteries themselves and by the Holy Metropolis of Stagoi and Meteora. Where published accounts give differing years for a foundation, this page gives the century rather than picking one. No visitor numbers are given here, and none should be inferred.

The ruins on the other rocks

Looking across from any of the six, you can see walls and window openings on pillars that have no stair. Those are the houses that failed, including foundations that were substantial in the sixteenth century. A few are consolidated and studied. Most are simply left, which is itself part of what Meteora shows: a monastic settlement is a living thing, and it contracts when the men and the means run out.

5. Inside the Main Church

Every Meteora monastery is organised around one principal church, called in Greek the katholikon. Smaller chapels may stand elsewhere on the rock, and the katholikon is where the community's own cycle of services is sung. The plan at the larger houses follows the type developed on Mount Athos, which is not surprising given that Athanasios came from Athos: a domed cross-in-square core, with two semicircular apses added on the north and south sides so that the ground plan reads as a trefoil, then a wide vestibule called the lite in front of it, and sometimes an outer porch beyond that.

The two side apses hold the choirs. Byzantine chant is sung antiphonally from them, one side answering the other, and the shape of the building is the shape of the singing. The dome above the centre carries Christ. The eastern apse behind the altar carries the Mother of God. A visitor who understands nothing else about the room can read it from those two points.

The iconostasis

A screen of icons stands between the nave and the sanctuary. At Meteora these are usually carved wood, gilded, worked with vines, birds and foliage, with icons set in fixed positions: Christ to the right of the central doors, the Theotokos to the left, then the saint or feast to whom the church is dedicated, then the rest. Orthodox theology treats the screen as the meeting point of the nave and the sanctuary, with the deacon and the priest passing through it and the icons standing along it as the company of heaven present at the same Liturgy.

The rooms around the church

A working monastery needs more than a church, and at Meteora the other rooms survive unusually well because there was nowhere to expand and so little was rebuilt. Several houses keep the old refectory with its long tables, the reading desk from which a monk read aloud while the community ate in silence, and the kitchen with its blackened hearth and bread oven. There are cisterns cut to catch every drop of rain on a rock with no spring. There are cells, storerooms, and in some houses an infirmary. Several keep an ossuary, a small chamber where the bones of the dead brethren are gathered after the grave has been reopened, the skulls ranged on shelves with names written on them. Orthodox visitors treat that room as an ordinary part of a monastery and a plain statement of what the monastic life is about.

6. The Frescoes and Their Painters

The paintings are the reason art historians come to Meteora. The churches were decorated in the sixteenth century, in the generations after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when the leading workshops of Greek painting were Cretan and worked across the Orthodox world from Crete, Athos and the mainland monasteries. The Meteora cycles are among the better preserved and better dated bodies of that work.

Theophanes the Cretan at Saint Nicholas Anapafsas

The small church of Saint Nicholas Anapafsas holds paintings by Theophanes Strelitzas, called Theophanes the Cretan, dated 1527. The art-historical literature places him among the leading painters of the Cretan school, and he later worked on Mount Athos. The church is cramped, built on a rock with no room, and he composed for it: figures set in landscapes that use the awkward wall surfaces, a restrained palette, faces modelled with a firm underpainting and fine highlights over it. The scene of Adam naming the animals in the narthex is the one visitors remember.

Frangos Katelanos at Varlaam

The main church at Varlaam carries a cycle attributed by its inscription to Frangos Katelanos of Thebes, dated 1548, with further work in the lite by other hands later in the century. The manner is denser and more crowded than Theophanes, with more ornament and more incident, and the martyrdom scenes are painted without softening. Varlaam is where a visitor can see how much variation the same tradition allows within twenty years.

The 1527 date at Saint Nicholas Anapafsas and the 1548 attribution at Varlaam rest on the painted inscriptions in the churches themselves and on the standard art-historical literature. Attributions of the other Meteora cycles are debated among specialists, and this page names a painter only where an inscription does.

What was lost

Meteora's movable treasure has been reduced repeatedly. Manuscripts and liturgical objects left the monasteries through sale, through the disruptions of the nineteenth century, and through looting during the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, when the monasteries were occupied and fought over. Substantial collections of manuscripts and icons do survive and are displayed in the museums at the Great Meteoron and elsewhere. The wall paintings survived better than anything else, because they could not be carried away.

7. The Byzantine Iconographic Tradition

The paintings at Meteora belong to a defined theological tradition with its own rules, its own defence and its own conciliar settlement. The visitor who knows the rules sees a different room.

Why images at all

The question was fought out in the Byzantine empire across the eighth and ninth centuries. Opponents of images argued from the commandment against graven images in Exodus 20:4. The defenders, above all Saint John of Damascus and later Saint Theodore the Studite, answered from the Incarnation: God cannot be depicted in his nature, and God became man and was seen, so what has been seen may be depicted. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787, the seventh ecumenical council, upheld the making and veneration of images and drew the distinction the tradition has kept since. Worship, latreia, belongs to God alone. Icons receive veneration, an honour that passes to the person represented. The Catholic Church holds the same council and the same distinction, which is why a Catholic in an Orthodox church is on familiar ground here.

The programme on the walls

A Byzantine church is painted to a scheme rather than to taste. Christ Pantokrator occupies the dome, looking down over the whole building. Below him run the prophets and evangelists. The apse over the altar holds the Mother of God with the child, and beneath her the bishops of the early Church shown celebrating the Liturgy, so that the visible clergy at the altar stand inside the same act. The upper walls carry the great feasts in order: Nativity, Baptism, Transfiguration, Raising of Lazarus, Entry into Jerusalem, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, Dormition. The lower registers carry standing saints and martyrs at the height of the congregation, which is deliberate. The Last Judgment is commonly painted where you leave, in the narthex or on the west wall, and it is the last thing seen on the way out.

The rules of the craft

Painters worked to inherited models. Postures, gestures, colours and the arrangement of each scene are handed down, and the painter's skill shows inside the constraint rather than against it. In the eighteenth century the monk Dionysios of Fourna compiled a painter's manual on Mount Athos that wrote much of this practice down: how to prepare a wall, how to mix, and how each scene is to be composed. That is why a Greek visitor can identify a scene at Meteora instantly. The visual language is fixed on purpose, so that the painting teaches rather than surprises.

8. Nets, Ladders and Cut Steps

For most of Meteora's history there were no steps. Access to a monastery was by long wooden ladders lashed together in sections, hooked to the rock and drawn up when the last man was inside, and by a rope net raised from a windlass tower on the summit. The net carried building timber, flour, wine, water in barrels, mail, visiting bishops and monks who were too old to climb. A monastery on a pillar with the ladders up was, in a bad century, unreachable.

The windlass is a simple machine and a slow one: a horizontal drum turned by monks pushing bars, a rope over a beam projecting from the platform, and a net or a wooden box at the end. Nineteenth century travellers wrote about being hauled up in it, and the anecdote most often repeated is the exchange in which a visitor asks how often the rope is replaced and is told that it is replaced when it breaks. That story circulated widely in travel writing of the period and should be read as a traveller's anecdote rather than as monastic policy.

The stairs

From the 1920s onward, stairways were cut into the rock faces at the monasteries that were to stay open, and later a road was carried up between the pillars. That work is what converted Meteora from a place a handful of pilgrims reached each year into a place a visitor can walk into, and it is the change that reshaped the site more than anything since the sixteenth century. Every open monastery today is entered on foot by steps, some of them long and steep and cut in tight turns around the rock. Saint Stephen is the exception in difficulty rather than in kind, entered across a short bridge with very little climbing, which makes it the one house that visitors with limited mobility can normally manage.

The old machinery has not been retired. Windlasses and cable lifts still bring up supplies at several of the houses, because there is no other way to move a load of cement or a winter's provisions onto a pillar. Visitors travel on the steps.

The dating of the cut stairways to the 1920s and after follows the monasteries' own published histories and the standard descriptions of the site. Individual houses give different years for their own stairs, and this page does not assign a year to any single monastery.

9. What Orthodox Monastic Life Is

The monks and nuns at Meteora live there under monastic vows and keep the whole cycle of services in their own houses. Understanding what they are doing changes how a visitor behaves in the building, so it is worth setting out as the Orthodox Church itself sets it out.

One vocation, no orders

Orthodox monasticism has no orders and no founders' rules in the Western sense. A man or a woman is tonsured a monastic and belongs to a particular monastery, under the abbot or abbess of that house, and stability in that house is the ordinary expectation. Ranks describe stages of the same life: the novice, then the rassophore who receives the habit, then the monastic of the little schema, then the great schema, which is the fullest commitment and carries its own distinctive garment. Advancement is a matter of the community's judgement and the person's readiness.

The daily cycle

The frame of the day is the cycle of services in the katholikon: the midnight office, matins, the hours, the Divine Liturgy, vespers and compline. Much of it falls at night or in the very early morning, which is deliberate, and it is long. Between the services come obedience, the assigned work of the house, and the private rule of prayer in the cell. Meals are taken in the refectory in silence while one brother reads aloud. Fasting is regulated by the calendar and is stricter in a monastery than in a parish, with meat generally absent altogether and fish, oil and wine allowed only on appointed days.

The Jesus Prayer

Running under all of it is the short invocation known as the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It is repeated continuously, often counted on a knotted wool rope, with the aim that the prayer settles into the person and continues under everything else they do. The tradition of prayer built around it is called hesychasm, from the Greek for stillness, and it was defended theologically by Saint Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, the same century in which Meteora was founded. The connected question of how the Orthodox describe knowing God, through his uncreated energies rather than his essence, is set out in our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church and what it believes.

Priests, monks and elders

Most Orthodox monks are not priests. Some are ordained to serve the community's Liturgy and are called hieromonks. Spiritual guidance runs through the abbot and through experienced monastics who hear confessions and direct others, a relationship the tradition takes very seriously. In a convent the abbess governs the community, and a priest comes to serve the Liturgy and to hear confessions. None of that is visible to a visitor walking through in twenty minutes, which is the point of saying it here.

10. Eastern Orthodox, Not Oriental Orthodox

Meteora is Eastern Orthodox. The monasteries fall under the Holy Metropolis of Stagoi and Meteora, a diocese of the Church of Greece, which is one of the autocephalous, meaning self-heading, Orthodox churches in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and with one another. The services are in Greek, the rite is Byzantine, and the calendar for fixed feasts in the Church of Greece is the revised one, so the Transfiguration falls on 6 August as it does in the West, while Pascha is reckoned by the older paschal calculation and usually falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter.

The distinction that gets blurred

The Oriental Orthodox churches are a different communion: Coptic, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara. They separated from the imperial Church after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 over the formula for describing the two natures in Christ, and they are not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches, though serious theological dialogue between the two families through the twentieth century found that much of the historic dispute was a matter of terminology. Nothing at Meteora is Oriental Orthodox, and the two families should not be run together.

How Rome regards these monasteries

The Catholic Church holds that the Orthodox churches have apostolic succession, valid orders and a valid Eucharist. The Second Vatican Council said so explicitly in its decree on ecumenism, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at paragraph 838 describes the communion between Catholics and the Eastern churches as so close that very little is wanting for the fullness that would permit a common celebration. What separates them is set out in our guides to the schism of 1054 and what actually caused it and to what the Catholic Church means by ecumenism.

So a Catholic standing in the church at Varlaam is standing in front of a real altar with a real Eucharist reserved on it, offered by a Church that Rome recognises. That recognition does not put the Catholic in communion with that altar, and the next section says what follows from that in practice.

11. Dress and Conduct at the Gate

Meteora's monasteries enforce a dress code, and they enforce it at the entrance rather than politely inside. The rules are stable, they apply to everyone, and they are not negotiable by argument at the gate.

What is expected

Shoulders and knees covered, for men and for women. Men wear long trousers. Women wear a skirt falling below the knee, and trousers on women are generally not accepted at Meteora even when they are modest, which surprises visitors who have been admitted elsewhere in trousers. Sleeveless tops, vests and low necklines are refused for either. Most of the houses keep a rack of wrap skirts and shawls at the entrance for visitors who arrive without them, and taking one and tying it on is an ordinary part of the visit. Bring your own if you would rather.

Inside the church

Men remove hats. Voices drop. Phones go silent and stay in a pocket. Photography inside the katholikon is forbidden at most of the houses and should never be assumed anywhere; if there is a sign, it means it, and if there is no sign, ask or do not photograph. Do not photograph a monk or a nun without asking first, and accept a refusal without pressing. Do not walk between someone venerating an icon and the icon. Do not touch the frescoes, do not lean on the iconostasis, and do not sit in the carved stalls along the walls, which belong to the community. If a service is in progress, either stand quietly at the back or leave.

The rest of the visit

Stay on the paths and inside the areas opened to visitors: the cells, the kitchens in use and the gardens are the community's home. Groups keep their volume down, and a guide talking over a service is the most common complaint the monasteries make. Eating, drinking and smoking belong outside the walls. Some houses offer visitors a small cup of water or a sweet on arrival, which is Greek monastic hospitality and is accepted with thanks. Candles are usually available inside for anyone who wishes to light one, and a Catholic may light one and pray freely.

12. The Feast Days of the Six

Each house keeps its patronal feast, and the feast is the day the monastery is most itself: a vigil the night before, the Divine Liturgy in the morning, and the community joined by clergy and people from the surrounding towns. Visitors are received differently on those days, and the arrangements are the monastery's to set.

Fixed dates above are the dates of the Byzantine calendar as kept by the Church of Greece, which follows the revised calendar for fixed feasts, so they coincide with the civil date. The movable feasts follow the Orthodox reckoning of Pascha, which usually differs from the Western date of Easter. Each monastery publishes its own observance and any variation belongs to the house.

Why the Transfiguration keeps recurring here

Two of the six are dedicated to the Transfiguration, and the largest of them takes its whole identity from it. The event is in Matthew 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36: Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a high mountain apart, and is transfigured before them, his face shining and his clothes made white, with Moses and Elijah speaking with him, and the voice from the cloud saying that this is his beloved Son. A monastery on top of a rock, dedicated to the mountain where the disciples saw the glory, is making a plain statement about what the life on that rock is for. The Orthodox keep the feast on 6 August with the blessing of grapes, and it ranks among the great feasts of the year.

13. A Catholic Visitor at Meteora

A Catholic can visit Meteora with a clear conscience and real profit, provided the visit is understood correctly. These rocks carry the homes of Orthodox communities that have prayed on them for six centuries and continue to. They are Orthodox houses rather than Catholic shrines, and no Catholic indulgence or devotion attaches to them.

Go as a guest

The posture that works is the guest's. Dress as the house asks before being asked. Move slowly and quietly. Venerate the icons if you wish, because Catholics hold the same council that defined the practice, and light a candle if you wish. Pray in the church for the community that lives there and for the unity of the Church, which is a prayer both traditions have asked for and which nobody at that gate will object to. Leave an offering if the house takes one. Then get out of the way.

What is worth looking at longest

The frescoes will take whatever time you give them, and the Last Judgment scenes in the narthexes reward standing still. The refectories and kitchens tell you more about the life than the churches do, because they show the ordinary hours. The ossuary, where a house keeps one, is worth entering rather than avoiding. So is the view down the ladder route from a windlass platform, which makes concrete what it cost to live there before the stairs.

Bringing it home

The useful part of Meteora is portable. A fixed rule of prayer at fixed hours, a short prayer repeated until it runs under the day, fasting kept by a calendar rather than by mood, silence at meals sometimes, and reading Scripture aloud rather than skimming it: all of that came off mountains like this one and none of it needs a plane ticket. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is and what the Church actually teaches about it sets out how a journey is meant to change the person who makes it, and making a pilgrimage without leaving home covers what to do when the journey is not possible.

14. Frequently Asked Questions