Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally written for Westminster College’s Travel Writing class, Fall 2006

“You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.” Alex Waugh

This isn’t the Greece of my 2006 calendar. The Greece of island beaches, Melina Mercouri swimming in her underwear, little white houses with blue roofs, Zorba dancing with his arms up. Where I’m now standing is a forest of rock, gray-and-yellow stone pinnacles that are streaked with rain, age, and bird excrement. And many of the pinnacles are topped by monasteries.

This is Meteora (meh-TAY-oh-ruh), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located 326 kilometers (202 miles) north of Athens above the Pineios River Valley on the northwestern edge of the Thessalian plain, Meteora’s spectacular sandstone spires rise 400 meters (1300 feet) above the foothills of the Pindos Mountains. “Meteora” comes from the adjective meteroso, meaning “suspended in air.” And its monasteries seem to be just that. UNESCO describes Meteora as “a unique example of monastic life since the 14th century” with frescoes that “are a fundamental stage in the development of post-Byzantine painting.” There are many monasteries throughout Greece, but the “unique example” part refers to the placement and setting of these buildings. Of the 24 monasteries built in Meteora, six are now active as museums and convents.

It is April, and we have just caught up with our son Ed. He has finished four months of classes at the Phillipe Nakas Conservatory, part of the new Semester in Athens program through Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He has been studying Greek language, history, and culture, and has received private instruction in the bouzouki, oudi, guitar, and Mediterranean percussion. He meets us at the airport with everything he’s brought to Greece. A guitar case with duct tape holding in the fraying edges. The red roller bag he got for high school graduation. An REI day pack with carabiners hanging off the webbing loops. His hair is now long ringlets, and his blue eyes are bloodshot. “Don’t get the car right away,” he says after hugging us. “Let’s just sit down for a while at the cafeino. I like the Nescafe frappés they have. C’mon, guys, we have plenty of time. Don’t be so . . . American.”

After an hour of sipping our frothy drinks and trying hard not to be too American, we start driving the rental van north. Lilacs and forsythias are in full bloom. Fields are plowed but bare, and grape leaves are only just starting to sprout from vines. Scarlet poppies decorate fields, vermillion geraniums are bursting out of tavernas’ clay pots, and lavender flowers seep from the cracks of ruined walls. Strewn across the landscape are sweet violets, dwarf yellow and velvety brown iris, daisies, anemones, periwinkle, and vetch. Greece is in bloom.

Ed had heard of Meteora from Petros, his percussion teacher, who said the area was a climbing mecca. Ed didn’t see Meteora until the conservatory’s nine-hour bus trip north to Grevena to see the carnival. In the rain and fog, the bus had stopped at a plaza in Kalambaka to drop and pick up passengers. “It was like something out of a fantasy novel, like out of Lord of the Rings,” Ed says of his view from the bus window. “I couldn’t believe it was a real town with real people and schools.” Asked for more details, Ed is quiet for a moment. “It’s not just that I liked it,” he said. “It’s that I realized it was a place where I wanted to live.” In addition to being a musician, Ed is a rock climber. Meteora had been love at first sight.
Greeks think Athens is still the center of the world, Ed tells us. Meteora feels like another planet. A local guidebook says, “The scenery suggests a vision of the world in the first days of the Creation and puts one in mind of the lost state of human innocence and perfection, of the decay of the human condition.” The spires themselves are conglomerates of limestone, marble, serpentine, and metamorphic rock interspersed with layers of sand and shale. Meteora is a rock community with 60-million-year-old stony fists thrusting up to the sky.

But it is the climbers—and perhaps Meteora’s many bird species—who can best understand the magnificence of this area. Eagles, swifts, martins, kites, storks, sparrow hawks, vultures, and falcons slice back and forth between the spires, alighting onto rocky ledges and cave verandas. Climbers are astonished at the difficulty of getting up to the monasteries and hermit caves. And that’s with just a standard climbing rack, not carrying building materials, baskets of food, or blankets for the winter. “There are these monasteries at the top of these serious and difficult routes that hardly anybody climbs today,” Ed says. “No chipped footholds or anything that would make it easy to get up.” The spectacular achievement of building shelters and spiritual retreats up so high is hidden to those tied to gravity.

For nonclimbers, the Meteora experience is a bit like driving through Zion National Park. You drive, stop, hike, look way up, and hike back to the car. Rock climbers have a deeper appreciation. “The walls are sheer, clean, even faces with only tiny little knobs,” Ed says. “There are bolts, but they’re often rusted or missing, and it’s easy to get off route. You have to have your bag of tricks [with chocks and other climbing ‘friends’ for traditional protection].” Ed does some top-roping with his brothers and pronounces the experience unique, like no other climbing he’s ever done.

During Turkish-Greco bloodshed in the eleventh century, hermit monks sought refuge in the region’s caves using retractable ladders. Later, windlasses were cranked by hand to haul supplies and monks in large nets. The Orthodox community grew grapes, corn, potatoes, sheep, and cattle in the valleys below. Some monks stayed in such isolation in their rocky aeries that they starved to death. Townspeople periodically had to climb up to retrieve the bodies.
Meteora is featured in For Your Eyes Only, the 1981 James Bond film. Before adding it to your Netflix queue, you can watch an actual clip by clicking on “Exotic Locations” at www.jamesbond.com/mmpr/index.php?cat=missions&id=fyeo
Actor Topol’s Milos Columbo character points to Meteora’s St. Stephen’s Monastery and tells Roger Moore’s Bond, “St Cyril’s—where we used to hide from the Germans. Only Kristatos [the movie’s villainous Russian operative] would make an abandoned monastery his personal retreat.” Actually, Topol isn’t that far off. During World War II, German occupying armies looted and destroyed monasteries in Meteora during raids on the Greek countryside, responding to increasing pressure by Greece’s anti-Nazi ELAS resistance fighters. Bill Conti’s musical score in For Your Eyes Only is awful, but Alan Hume’s cinematography is magnificent.

Walking in Athens can feel like entering someone’s parlor or living room. You’re an expected guest, and Greeks jump to get you things to eat and drink. Exploring Kastraki—the village closest to Meteora’s spires—is more like walking into a bedroom. Shopkeepers seem surprised to see outsiders buying groceries. Kids play soccer in the square near the tiny “Super” Market where we select apples, cheeses, bread, and Ion milk chocolate bars for the next day. After the crowded confusion of Athens, this picturesque village has a welcome intimacy.

The monasteries have a strict dress code, and the nuns at Saint Varvaras Rousanou direct unprepared women to choose from baskets piled with cotton apron-like skirts. The Greek Orthodox Church owns all the monasteries and charges two Euros to view the small, immaculately kept hallways, frescoes, paintings, and chapel. Pots of small shrubs line the patio. Wood buffed in lemon oil, vases of white lilies, and manicured geometric flower beds add to the reverent ambience. In the gift shop, two somber nuns swathed in black sell books, beeswax candles, rosary beads, crucifixes, bookmarks, painted religious icons, and Meteora shot glasses.

We rent two rooms in Kastraki and then walk across the road for dinner at the taverna, where we’re the first people seated when the restaurant opens the gates at 7:30. Sometimes you have to just give up and be American. We order platters of lamb, pork, and chicken, and savor the thick slices of feta, the fresh tomatoes, and red wine “from the barrel.” Patient cats curl around the chairs waiting for dropped morsels. Breakfasts are included at our hotel, but its spread of ham, cheese, bread, and cookies seems more like picnic fare, so we gorge at dinner. “The Greeks,” Ed says, “just have coffee and a cigarette in the morning.”

As a sensitive musician sandwiched between two analytical brothers, Ed is seldom the one in charge. On this trip, however, he blooms between the rocks of temperment and birth order. He translates, navigates, suggests food and wine, explains history and customs, and teaches us kalimera (good morning), kalispera (good afternoon—after the siesta), and kalinikta (good night). “He’s gone Greek!” my husband says.

We see a country—and a young man—come into full flower.