Sightseeing in Kalabaka

Kalabaka is the town above which the Meteora stand: grey sandstone pillars up to four hundred metres tall, with monasteries on their summits built when the only way up was a rope ladder or a net on a windlass. Of twenty-four houses six are active: Great Meteoron with its museum and old kitchen, Varlaam with its frescoes, Roussanou, Saint Stephen, Holy Trinity, Saint Nicholas Anapausas. Roads to them were laid only in the twentieth century; before that the monks lived, quite literally, between heaven and earth for centuries.

The full-day tour with a driver is the basic way to see it all: a circuit of the pillars, three or four monasteries with time inside, viewpoints where the rocks stand as a wall, and a stop in Kastraki, the village directly beneath the stones. The dress code is enforced in earnest: covered shoulders, skirts handed out to women at the door. The private version allows what the group one cannot — starting before the coaches, or staying for the sunset, when the pillars turn copper.

The walking route is a genre of its own: old monks' paths between the pillars, where a scale opens that cannot be read from the road. An hour or two of climbing through woodland, and the monasteries stop being scenery behind car glass and become a point you reached on foot. In Kalabaka itself the church of the Dormition deserves a visit — an eleventh-century basilica with a marble pulpit in the middle of the nave.