The monasteries that took to the air

The plain of Thessaly, in central Greece, is otherwise unremarkable farmland, which makes what happens near the town of Kalambaka all the more startling. Without much warning, the flat ground gives way to a cluster of sandstone pillars, some of them well over three hundred metres tall, rising almost vertically out of the plain like something left behind by a much larger landscape that has since worn away everywhere else. On top of several of them, improbably, sit monasteries.

Rock, river and sixty million years

The pillars are a genuine geological oddity: conglomerate rock, made of sand and pebbles cemented together, laid down by rivers and an ancient sea millions of years ago and then shaped, slowly, by weathering and earthquakes into the vertical columns visible today. Nothing about the rock itself suggests it should hold a building. That, for the monks who first climbed it, was rather the point.

Why anyone built up there

Monastic communities began settling on the Meteora pillars from around the eleventh century, with most of the surviving monasteries dating from the fourteenth century onward, a period when the wider Byzantine world was under increasing pressure and isolation had a clear practical value alongside its spiritual one. Height was defence as much as devotion: a monastery two or three hundred metres up a sheer rock face is not easily raided. Of the roughly two dozen monasteries eventually built into these rocks, six remain active today, maintained by small communities of monks and nuns.

Getting up, then and now

For centuries, the only way to reach several of the monasteries was by a system of removable rope ladders, or by nets and baskets hauled up on a windlass, an arrangement that concentrated the mind of anyone making the journey and effectively sealed the community off whenever the ropes were drawn in. Steps cut into the rock, added in the twentieth century, have made the ascent considerably more straightforward for everyone since, though the views from partway up still make clear why the original builders were confident nobody would be following them uninvited.

The Great Meteoron, the biggest and oldest of the surviving monasteries, was founded in the fourteenth century by Athanasios Meteorites, a monk from Mount Athos credited with giving the whole formation its name, from the Greek word for "suspended in the air". Its katholikon, the main church, is decorated with wall paintings from the sixteenth century, dim with candle smoke and age, depicting saints and scenes of martyrdom rendered in unflinching detail. Varlaam, a short walk across the plateau, is nearly as old and holds a small museum of manuscripts and vestments, evidence of a community that was, for centuries, as much a centre of learning and craft as of prayer.

Meteora on the way through

Meteora sits well enough off the main route between Athens and the Ionian coast that it tends to appear on itineraries built with some deliberate ambition, rather than as an afterthought. Tours that link Greece with western Turkey, taking in Troy, Ephesus and Istanbul alongside Delphi, Mycenae and the Peloponnese, often use Kalambaka, the town at the foot of the rocks, as a stopping point, a practical base for the short climb up before the route continues east across the Aegean. It is an unusual pairing on paper, an Orthodox monastic complex sharing a trip with the ruins of Troy and the mosques of Istanbul, but both halves are, in their own way, about how much people were once prepared to build to be closer to something they believed mattered.

What stays with you

Photographs of Meteora tend to flatten it into a single, striking image: a monastery on a rock. What they miss is the plain around it, ordinary and agricultural in every direction, which makes the pillars look less like a planned destination and more like an accident of geology that a handful of very determined people decided, several centuries ago, not to waste.