Amazing! Stunning! Incredible!

Where to begin… This weekend was tiring, long, short, spontaneous, unplanned, interesting, stressful, peaceful, gorgeous, and incredible. Before I get into the details, I’ll let you know what I was doing! I, as I mentioned in previous blogs, was traveling to Meteora, and area Northwest of Thessaly in Greece. I had heard of this place last summer, but couldn’t end up going there for whatever reasons, so I knew for sure I wanted to go this trip. I will explain what it is eventually. Patience. But, it was absolutely amazing. But not the whole time! I will begin my story on Friday afternoon and evening.

After having a nice Friday of wandering and visiting the fruit market, exploring Plaka and Monastiraki, and getting absolutely no school work done, my roommate and I decided to go to dinner. After failing to persuade our semi-sick roommate to join us, we ventured out to a little taverna in our neighborhood. We got great food, observed fun Greeks, chatted about random things, laughed a lot, drank lovely wine, and came back, in the pouring rain, much too late to be leaving first thing in the morning to Meteora! Regardless, we came back and got our things packed and ready, me with my backpack and Kara with her purse. Alarms set, we went to bed.

Too soon after closing my eyes to sleep, I awoke to 5:30 am and I was up again and walking outside in the rain to a supposed bus stop in Syntagma (there are tons!) and looking for the stop from which bus 024 departed from. So, using my handy rain cover of my backpack (good choice Mip), I protected my bag and walked around, still dark outside, wet, and hopeful that the weekend would improve. Anyway, our plan (I know, funny) was to walk to Syntagma (15ish minutes), bus to the main bus station in Athens in order to leave at 7:30 am. We ended up taking the bus the wrong direction (ugh!) and ended up on the other side of town, so we waited and were driven back to the actual bus station at about 8 or 8:15. Thus, we decided to take the 9:30 am bus and alter the plan a bit. At the bus station, we ordered our tickets for there and back and relaxed a bit in the station, happy to be out of the rain and with tickets in hand. We got on our bus at 9:30 and set out for our next destination, still not Meteora!

The bus we took from Athens was taking us to a connecting bus in Trikala, which took 4 and a half or 5 hours , even though our tickets included the fare all the way to Kalambaka, the small town below Meteora. We waited about 15 minutes for that bus, hopped on and drove into the rain once again. That was about a 30 or 45 minute bus ride to the town, where we picked somewhere to get off the bus and got some food, wandered, etc. It was about 4 pm or so by this point, and for various reasons (confusion about transportation, not enough time, closing monasteries, etc) we did not go up to Meteora that evening. The plan of the afternoon and evening was to find somewhere to stay, eat, relax, find our bus stop, and figure out how the heck to get to the “city of monastic life on rocks,” as my little tourist books refers to Meteora.

So, we did just that. An old guy on a moped chased us around for a while trying to convince us to stay at his hotel, we got random stares from the townspeople, and we found a nice little gyro place to eat lunch/dinner. We had our meal, ran into some people who spoke English (maybe from Canada?) and asked them for a few tips and recommendations for a hotel. We went to their recommendation to find it was closed…hard to believe, but we went to random places and finally found a simple place. The little old woman in charge was sweet and after giving us a look up and down, listed a pretty good price. So, we looked in a room, decided to stay there. We dropped off some books from our bags and set off to explore and find the bus stop and some sort of plan for the next day. We probably walked those streets a ton of times in that few hour span just checking things out. We saw a sign leading to a Byzantine church for the assumption of Mary and followed it up to the church. It was a good walk and uphill, but gave us a beautiful view of the city and everything. Going into the church was incredible because it was very old and beautifully painted, as are all amazing Byzantine churches. It felt so peaceful and sacred to be in that old church. It was aesthetically beautiful, but also had another sense of beauty that I cannot really describe in words. It got me very excited for the day ahead at the monasteries.

After descending the hill down to the main road in the town, we finally caved and asked someone where the bus stop was as we realized it was in seeing distance! So we got our return ticket filled out with time and a seat number, etc and the lady mentioned a bus that went up to the monasteries! We had heard from everyone else you either had to have a planned tour before coming to the town or had to take a taxi to the monasteries. So we grabbed bus tickets for 8 30 am for 1,40 euro and went back to our hotel to get the books we had dropped off to sit at a nice café and enjoy the night. Well, by this time it had stopped raining, but was chilly! We were drinking hot chocolate and feeling like it was a nice autumn day! So strange for Greece! I journaled a while and read my book with the letters of Mother Teresa in it and had a splendid time. Then, around 8 we headed back to our room, exhausted and just about ready for bed. Once again, we observed a Greek Orthodox wedding! From our balcony, we could see some of the rocks of Meteora, a church, and random other buildings. We saw the bride and did a fair amount of stalking! It was fun. By 10 or so, after reading and journaling and relaxing, we headed to bed in order to wake up early, though not as early as that day, and catch our bus! We knew we only had until about 1 pm to see everything we could because our bus out of Kalambaka to Trikala left at 2:15! We got up to beautiful weather, perfect for all of our walking, and began our day!

Waiting for the bus, we met some other travelers, chatted a while, and discussed the day. Finally, we saw our bus arrive and so began some of the most awestruck and amazing hours of my life. I may seem dramatic, but this place was really incredible. Meteora means something like “suspended in the sky,” which describes the area pretty well! Meteora was deemed “holy ground, unchangeable and unviolated” by the Holy Synod of the Church in Greece in 1995 by civil law. It is also recognized as a “protected Monument for Humanity” by UNESCO and other international organizations and must be maintained “as such for bearing witness to Christian, historical, architectural, agiographic (and generally artistic) and geological evidence.” (By the way, my quotes and snazzy intellectual phrases indicate information taken from my little info book I picked up on site). In addition, the theory most commonly held about the site is that a delta shaped cone made up of river stones and mud poured into the ancient Thessaly basin and that after geological separations the waters found an outlet and the delta shaped mass broke up into huge stones up to 400 meters high. Pretty ridiculous, but cool. So, you can look up more info on the site yourself later if you are interested but I’m going to talk about my experience a bit more! (By the way, my research paper/presentation for my Byzantine History course is going to be on Meteora, so I’ll know more eventually!)

So the bus took us up to the largest and most impressive monastery, the Holy Monastery of Grand Meteoron. From there we were just going to wing it and try to get a taxi back to the town when we were going to leave. That didn’t work quite as well as planned, but I will explain that later! Even riding the bus was a beautiful view and nearly took my breath away. We got off the bus at the first monastery and, as my many photos show, required us to take a lot of stairs! We walked hundreds of stairs in those few hours for sure. Inside the monastery there was an old carpenter’s station, kitchen, ossuary, cellar, etc. There were also a few museums! We could not take photos in the museums, but there were beautiful displays of carvings, paintings, jewelry, silverware, dishes, clothing, documents, books, etc. The artistic detail and precision of the works was amazing and I wished I could take all of it home! I actually bought a print of a copper engraving of the area that a monk had done a long time ago! But after exploring that area and little courtyards, etc we finally went into the church, which words cannot describe. Similar to the church I described earlier, there was such beautiful decoration and paintings coating the interior, but even more than that, the sense sacredness was profound. I could have laid in the floor there and looked up for hours trying to follow all the stories and take in all of the paintings. Alas, we had to leave, but upon leaving, and taking tons of photos, we did not know where to go or how to get there.

So, we saw another monastery in the distance and decided we would try to get to it! So we started walking along the road (probably very dangerous with the way Greeks drive!) and got to the next one, Varlaam, in a little while. It was such a pleasant walk with the view and the weather! Varlaam was smaller than the Grand Meteoron for sure, but it had such a sweet charm and was so nice itself. And after that, we walked to the last one we got to visit, The Holy Monastery of St. Barbara Roussanou. This one was also smaller, with a sweet charm of its own. I do not have as many pictures from these two because they had less in them, and because we weren’t allowed to take photos in the actual churches.

From here, we called a number on a pay phone to a taxi service, wasting money on my phone, since we got disconnected both times and a taxi did not come. We were kind of nervous and almost contemplating asking a random person for a ride… We were almost going to go back UP to the monastery to ask the person at the entrance advice. That would have been quite a hike back up those stairs, and if we did, we could miss our non-existent taxi! So we waited and sat for a little while, contemplating. We saw a random bus drive by that looked like the one we had taken up to Meteora from Kalambaka, tried to wave, but still sat there hoping we were not going to miss our bus! We then saw a bus again in 10 minutes or so and I waved excitedly and they stopped! I don’t think it was actually supposed to, but I guess we looked like we needed it! So back down the mountain we went, saying a sad goodbye to beautiful Meteora.

Getting back into town we had some lunch and ice cream and got our bus back to Trikala. Everything was great…. Nope! My roommate had somehow left her wallet at the bus station in Kalambaka! (As did one of my other roommates, but hers was on a taxi on Saturday, not returned back to her…) She realized it in a minute or so, but the bus could not turn around for it. We had one of the workers on the bus call the station, get her wallet and keep it safely. It turns out they brought it on the next bus to Trikala from Kalambaka and everything was okay. I ended up taking the 3:30 bus as planned back to Athens, as Kara insisted, but she waited for the next one in 2 hours. So after a long and peaceful bus ride brushing up on Ancient Greek Grammar I got to Athens. I waited at the bus stop for ages and ages and finally a bus came to bring me back to Syntagma. I walked back from there to our Academic Center and then to my apartment. All was well. Such a great experience, even with all the traveling to get there!

It was a great weekend and so nice to be away from the busyness of Athens and all the American college-age people! I hope I showed you a glimpse of the beauty of this place. It was incredible! Make sure to check out the pictures on my site. They should go in the same order as the blog and so you should be able to identify most things or follow what they are of!

Lots of love and will update later! Off to catch up on readings!