Day trips to the spectacular monastic complex of Meteora in central Greece are one of the most popular long excursions for visitors to Athens and provide an essential complement to any cultural visit to the country. The complex of six surviving Orthodox Christian monasteries perched on top of vertical sandstone pillars near the small town of Kalambaka sits around three hundred and fifty kilometres north of Athens and is reached typically by guided coach tour or by self-driven car. The Meteora monasteries were established between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries on the summits of a series of natural sandstone columns that rise up to four hundred metres above the surrounding plain of Thessaly. The original hermitages were established by individual ascetic monks who climbed the columns using rope ladders, and the developed monastic communities of the late medieval and Renaissance periods occupied the summits as places of refuge from the various Ottoman incursions of the surrounding region. The standard organised day trip from Athens involves a long round-trip journey by coach, typically departing from a central Athens hotel pick-up at around six in the morning and returning to the same point at around ten or eleven at night. The journey time is around five hours each way along the principal national highway, with one or two refreshment stops typically included on the outbound and return legs. The standard day visit typically includes guided tours of two or three of the six surviving monasteries, with the selection varying according to the day of the week and the seasonal schedule. The largest of the six, the Great Meteoron, the Varlaam Monastery, the Roussanou Monastery, the Saint Stephens Monastery, the Saint Triadas Monastery and the Saint Nikolaos Anapaftiko all maintain regular visitor schedules with rotating days of closure for the maintenance of the religious community. The various organised tour operators also offer a more flexible alternative based on the Athens to Kalambaka express train service, which takes around four and a half hours each way to the small town at the foot of the Meteora rocks. The train option allows visitors to spend an overnight in Kalambaka and explore the monasteries at a more relaxed pace over two days, with a return to Athens on the following evening or the morning after that. The two-day option is particularly popular with serious photographers and visitors with a deeper interest in the various monasteries and the wider Orthodox monastic tradition.

Type: Activity

Address: Athens, Greece