The route to Meteora is described in our guidebook as one of the prettiest in Greece but it was still hazy today and I have to say that our route last Friday and Saturday and those in the Peloponnese (especially 9th and 10th May) were much nicer. This road was also much busier, we hardly ever met another vehicle on the other routes, but here there were many heavy lorries and quarry trucks servicing the construction sites for the new motorway that is being built through the mountains (quite literally in many cases). There was no way of overtaking the lorries, so we just had to be patient. Fortunately, the bends in the road were not as tight and the hills not as steep as on Saturday, so gear changes and breaking (both still painful) were not as frequent.
We have been to Meteora (meaning 'rocks in the air') before but the first sight still took our breath away. Massive rock formations, their cliffs etched with numerous caves, cover the area and dominate the villages below them. Perched on top of some of the pinnacles of rock, in seemingly totally inaccessible positions, are monasteries. In the 10th century Christian hermits started to use the natural caves but in the 14th century two monks from Mount Athos (a Greek monastic community) visited and decided to to establish a monastery. The idea caught on and at one time 24 of the rock pinnacles had monasteries on them. Many of the rocks as classified as 'advanced routes' by today's rock climbers and it is difficult to understand how they managed to build the monasteries without modern tools. Even in the middle of the 20th century, visitors were still winched up the rocks in baskets but now steps have been carved into the rock, staircases built and bridges constructed to span the gap to adjacent rocks. Hopefully, the photographs that I have included will give some idea of the spectacular scenery but it is very difficult to do it justice.
The journey had not been a long one and we arrived in time to drive around the area. We stopped at Roussanou (Ayias Varvaras) and walked up the steps and over the bridge to the small monastery. The very small chapel had some very good frescoes and we were particularly impressed by the wall full of depictions of martyrdom. There was a wide selection of methods available – fire was very popular (boiling or burning), then there was impaling on a wooden stake, beheading, having all your limbs chopped off, death by a thousand cuts (attached to a wheel and rotated so that your body was cut by knives stuck into the ground below the wheel) – to name but a few! Greek churches often have horrendous depictions of The Last Judgement but this one was particularly gruesome. We drove on to two other monasteries to admire the views but decided not to visit them today.
We drove down to Kastraki, just below the monasteries, where the campsite 'Vrachos' was located. It was a hot day again, so we found a shady pitch near the swimming pool and settled in. I decided to see if Terry and Stuart had arrived and set off following signs towards the 'New Place' i.e. a more recent addition to the campsite. I had only taken a few steps when I met Stuart and established that we must have been within minutes of each other travelling along the Ioannina to Meteora road. Stuart was on a shopping expedition. They had run out of wine when we met them at Ioannina so they drank our wine. They had already told us that they wanted to supply the wine next time that we met and had purchased exactly the same wine in Lidl. At least they thought that they had – it had the same name on the label, it cost the same (€1.99 - £1.60 for 1.5 litres!) and it was red. It was only earlier today that they had bought the medium sweet red wine instead of the dry. They had tried it at lunch time and Stuart described it as 'absolutely terrible' and to make matters even worse, they had bought 2 bottles, 3 litres of it. For a Yorkshireman who has lived for many years in Scotland, the waste of money was a tragedy! This campsite, just like the one in Ioannina, sold wine in their shop but at a ridiculously high price, in this case the cheapest red wine was over €8 (£6.40) a bottle - “'Ow much?”. Stuart had explained to us that if you stay silent for long enough in any shopping street in the world, you will hear “'Ow much?” and you will know that the person is a Yorkshireman! Stuart was determined to find a supermarket in the village that had better value wine.
Stuart directed me to where they had parked and I walked for about half a mile through the rambling campsite until I got to the furthest corner of the site and there I found Terry with Maisie, their campervan. Arriving unnoticed, I said in a loud voice “Excuse me, have you got any red wine to spare?”. Shortly afterwards, Stuart arrived back after a successful expedition and we decided that we should get together for a meal that evening. Maisie has very limited cooking facilities, so I offered the use of our BBQ and oven with Stuart supplying the dry red wine! Another excellent evening was had in such easy-going company and I was able to clock up a first – watching fireflies. Our son Simon had seen fireflies near our Somerset village but I had never been lucky enough to encounter them. We sat outside on a beautifully warm evening and Stuart pointed out that there were fireflies a few metres away. Later some flew over and around us – a fascinating and lovely sight.
Photos: Varlaam Monastery from below; Varlaam from above.
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