Meteora is a set of Orthodox monasteries built on the bare summits of towering rock pillars, reached for centuries only by rope, net, and lashed-together ladder. Its Greek name means "suspended in the air," and the sight is almost literal: grey towers of conglomerate and sandstone, some rising more than 300 metres above the plains of Thessaly, shaped over millions of years by water and weather. From the middle of the 14th century, monks climbed these rocks to pray in isolation and to shelter from the raids sweeping the region; Saint Athanasios, who came from Mount Athos, founded the first and greatest, the Great Meteoron, on its broad summit around 1356. At their peak in the 16th century, twenty-four monasteries crowned the pillars, and six survive today, added together to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988 for both their architecture and the raw landscape that holds them.
The old baskets and rope ladders are gone — steps were cut into the stone in the 1920s — so you now climb worn stairways and cross short bridges to reach churches whose walls are covered edge to edge with Byzantine frescoes. Monks and nuns still live behind these walls, and visitors enter quietly, shoulders and knees covered. Come at first light and mist rising off the plain leaves the towers floating like islands; by late afternoon the sun warms the rock faces to a deep gold. The same sheer walls draw climbers from around the world, tracing routes up faces the monks once thought unreachable, while Holy Trinity, alone at the top of its long stair, played a part in a 1981 James Bond film.