Meteora Monasteries

The Meteora are sandstone pillars rising from the Thessalian plain near Trikala, whose summits hold an Orthodox monastic complex. Hermit monks lived in the rocks by the ninth century, and by the eleventh century they had formed the Skete of Stagoi.

Permanent monasteries came in the fourteenth century, as Turkish raids drove monks to the inaccessible pinnacles. In 1344 Athanasios the Meteorite arrived from Mount Athos, and between 1356 and 1372 he built the Great Meteoron under the local ruler Simeon Uroš's protection; Simeon's son John Uroš abdicated to die as a monk there in the 1420s.

More than twenty houses were founded, reachable only by jointed ladders and hauling ropes, said to be replaced only when they broke. Theophanes built the monastery of Varlaam in 1517, keeping the finger of Saint John and the shoulder blade of Saint Andrew.