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Published: October 1st 2010
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The James Bond Monastery
aka The Monaster yof the Holy Trinity I first discovered Meteora unknowingly about 10 years ago while watching the James Bond Movie "For Your Eyes Only". It was the image of a sombre monastery perched on the peak of a gargantuan column of rock, all set amidst a backdrop of gnarled craggy peaks that made me decide then and there that one day I would visit that place. So I was pleasantly surprised when planning our trip that that very place was a standard tourist attraction.
We had planned to leave Thessaloniki bright and early but I had stupidly booked our rental car from an office in the nether-regions of Thessaloniki. This meant that it took ages to get there, although in doing so, I got to enjoy a rather protracted escapade on the public bus. We then started driving the wrong direction - towards Bulgaria - but luckily discovered our mistake fairly quickly. 10 am rolled in and we were finally on our way to Thessaloniki on the #1 national highway.
Greece has a fabulous highway system - broad roads, excellent sign posting, and best of all minimal tolls. Unfortunately, that excellent highway system means that you don't get to wander through too many little
Isolation
What better way to say 'visitors not welcome' towns i.e. no quaint scenery. This is more than compensated for by the numerous petrol stations with attached restaurants. Petrol station food is great in Greece - they love their deserts, and every one of those places had something sweet and unusual. Our favourite was a creamy delight served with a lattice of hair-like pastry, together with pecans and some brown cinnamon-ish powder stuff.
After three hours of driving, and numerous shots of cholesterol packed dessert, we pulled into the small town of Kalambaka, which sits at the base of Meteora. Meteora means "suspended rocks" which is a rather accurate description of the place. Picture barren rocky mountains that are then carved into vertical pillars - very much like stalagmites but a hundred times taller. You can imagine climbing to the top of those peaks is difficult work. This made it an ideal place for vulnerable monks to build their monasteries, in order to escape the onslaught of marauding Turks. It also meant that they could live their ascetic life of solitude, and would only be bothered by the most persistent of door-to-door salesmen. Most were only accessible by vertical ascent, or more commonly, sitting in a bucket and
Room of death
Its too hard to take monks all the way to the bottom of the mountain to bury them, so they just keep their skulls all in a big room for all eternity. Not sure what happens to the rest of the body though. being winched up slowly. Pretty scary stuff considering how high those peaks are.
Today most of those monasteries are no longer operational ... well, they do house a few monks each, but mostly to look after the place to make sure the numerous tourists don't do too much damage. There are about 6 monasteries open to tourists. We decided to visit two - the Grand Meteoria - biggest and most famous of all. And then of course, the Agia Triada (Monastery of the Holy Trinity), which was where James Bond "For Your Eyes Only" was filmed.
The monasteries are most impressive from the outside, simply because of their dramatic positions. Its an awe-inspiring scene to take in. Inside though, they are rather rustic and bland - which is what one would expect given that they were supposed to be the abode of ascetic monks. The enterprising monks at the Grand Meteora monastery tried to spruce the place up by adding a mini museum. More commendable was a display room which explained what Christianity was about - but then sadly they had nobody at the end to talk to if you were interested in converting. At first, we thought
As seen in "For Your Eyes Only"
The James Bond movie. I even went home and checked - its the same room. This is the way they monks come up - they sit in a bucket and get winched up into this room. this was a critical oversight, but then we realized that they were Greek Orthodox. Something like 95%!o(MISSING)f Greeks are Orthodox, which meant that if you saw the display and decided to convert, it was most likely that you weren't Greek. This would create a rather embarrassing situation since a non-Greek Greek Orthodox would just be weird. So perhaps the lack of a person to talk to was intentional? Okay - I'll shut my mouth now before I enrage my Greek Orthodox readership.
The James Bond monastery (Agia Triada) was considerably smaller but in my opinion more 'real'. Nothing touristy about this place at all. We arrived just before closing time so we had the entire place to ourselves. It was a little bit creepy - stony walls with lots of Greek Icons and candles all in dimly lit rooms. The single monk we saw had a huge beard and was reminiscent of
Rasputin from Anastasia. I did get to see the little room with a bucket winch that the monks used to ascend with - these days, its been replaced by a rather windy and steep set of stairs. That bucket room was in James Bond from memory
so I took lots of pictures - not sure why - must have gotten caught up in teenage-girl-like movie fan frenzy.
We left Meteora late in the afternoon and started another 4 hour drive to Delphi. Delphi is famed for its famous Oracle. If you are familiar with Greek mythology, you would be familiar with this fume-sniffing wild haired woman that babbles nonsensical one-liners. More of that in tomorrow's blog though. The trip to Delphi was via smaller non-major highways, so we passed through lots of smaller Greek cities. Unfortunately Greece seems to be much too affluent these days, so there weren't any quaint scenes to see - perhaps the best we got was a few wrinkled weathered face old men slurping on bottles of coke by the highway watching the traffic go by.
We pulled into Delphi just before 9pm - tired and hungry. We were met by the most friendly hotel owner ever at Pithos Rooms hotel (review: its not a particularly fancy place - but clean and tidy). Delphi is definitely a tourist town - the main street was essentially souvenir and restaurants and every man and his dog was either selling mousaka, gyros or
feta cheese. And apart from the main street - there was nothing else. We thus had rather low expectations for food quality but were pleasantly surprised - we had probably the best food in our entire Greek trip at a gorgeous kitsch restaurant set overlooking the gulf of Corinth (yes - for those of you who read your Bible, we were within eye shot of the city of Corinth apparently - or maybe telescope shot). Personal favourite was fried sour cheese drenched in cream and more cheese - my arteries probably needed a good clean out after that meal.
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