Meteora is a cluster of rock pillars rising 300 metres above the plain of Thessaly in central Greece, and on top of six of them stand Orthodox monasteries, built by monks who first climbed the rock in the fourteenth century to get away from the world. The pillars are not carved cliffs but cemented river pebbles and sand, dumped where a delta once emptied into a lake and later cut into towers, and their rounded grey shapes stand in a forest of dozens above the town of Kalambaka. For centuries the only way up was a rope: goods and people were winched to the top in a net, and the rope was replaced, the monks said, only when the Lord let it break. Steps were cut into the rock in the 1920s, and now you climb the last stair, pass through a low gate, and enter a courtyard hung over the drop, with frescoed chapels, wooden balconies and the plain spread out hundreds of metres below.
Six of the twenty-four monasteries that once stood here are still lived in, and two of them are nunneries; the Great Meteoron is the oldest and largest, and Agios Nikolaos the smallest, with frescoes by the Cretan painter Theophanes. Between them, old footpaths thread the wooded gorges from one rock to the next, past hermit caves in the cliff faces and springs that the coaches never reach, and the walk is how the monks themselves moved between the towers. The rock is also climbed for its own sake: the pebbly conglomerate takes hundreds of routes, and climbers can be picked out on the towers most dry afternoons. The evening light is watched from the Psaropetra outcrop, a rock set among the monasteries where the pillars go orange and then grey against the plain. On cold, still mornings from November to February, mist fills the whole plain and the pillars stand above it like islands with the monasteries floating on top, a view that no summer visitor sees. The name means suspended in the air, and for six hundred years that has been the point.