Meteora Visit

Meteora is an amazing place and one we visit every time we go to Greece. It is hard to explain Meteora in words but basically there are these huge rocks with monasteries on top of them. Monks started building them in the 14^th century to escape enemies (pirates, Turks, etc.). The only way to get in and out was through a large net that the monks used to pull up with a rope through a system of pulleys. You saw the system in some of the monasteries during our visit. There are now stairs to take you to the top and even my mother a few years ago while in her seventies was able to get on top although at a relatively slow pace. You can check Wikipedia for a lot more details on Meteora and its history. It typically takes 4 hours to get there from Athens.  We typically do the visit as a long day trip. We leave early in the morning from Athens (let’s say 8am) drive there, visit 2-4 monasteries and then drive back. This time we didn’t have to worry about the drive back since we were going to Yannina afterwards which is only a couple of hours away. It allowed us to sleep in a bit (we left Athens around 10am).

Since we had visited there many times before we decided to visit only two monasteries: the Monastery of Varlaam and the Great Meteoron. We decided to use Google Maps for directions this time but that didn’t work out well at all because there were some errors that led us to the wrong locations. The signs on the road are more reliable which is the way we used to do it. I’d say you should stick with them. You need to be aware that not all the monasteries are open every day and some of them close earlier than others. Also, some of them are relatively far apart and parking is an issue often. You need to budget your time appropriately. Also, for some reason, lines this year (2023) were much longer than usual in some of the monasteries, so you need to make sure you have a plan laid out that allows you to use your time efficiently. We got a bit stressed out with the long lines and we had to rush the visit in the second monastery. We unfortunately didn’t plan well and got to the monastery that was open late first which was a mistake. I thought we had plenty of time when planning the visit but that ended up not being the case with the delay due to our Google Maps troubles and the long lines. It was a good visit, nevertheless.