Meteora Monasteries

The monasteries built on the sandstone pillars of Thessaly, where hermits lived in the caves from the eleventh century and St Athanasios the Meteorite, come from Mount Athos, founded the Great Meteoron in the fourteenth. There were once more than twenty; six still live. Until the 1920s the only way up to several of them was a rope ladder or a net hauled up by a windlass, and the monks, asked when the rope was replaced, are said to have answered: when the Lord lets it break. UNESCO listed them in 1988. They draw great numbers of visitors now, and still keep the round of services, the fasts and the silence for which they were built so far from the ground.