Weekend Trip: Ioannina & Meteora

Saturday and Sunday there was a school sponsored fieldtrip to two towns in Greece: Ioannina to see the famous Perama Cave and a castle where Ali Pasha once lived, and then on Sunday to Meteora to see the famous monasteries "Suspended from the Sky" (literal translation of Meteora).

Thessaloniki to Ioannina is about 2.5 hours. From there to Meteora
was about 2 more hours.

To get to Ioannina we traveled on Egnatia Road, which was originally constructed in the second century BC by the Romans and is known as the road from Rome to Istanbul. The actual road that crosses northern Greece that we traveled on was only just completed in the last five years. The town of Ioannina is located in Epirus and has about 120,000 inhabitants. It was established in the 6th century AD by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and is situated around Lake Pamvotis. It's a beautiful city with mountains surrounding the lake and a fortress built through the city. Some of the students climbed on the ruins without noticing the large rope sectioning them off--I don't think the Greek man yelling at them was too happy. But who knows? We couldn't understand him and all Greeks seem to yell when the speak anyway... at least we got some cool photos. 

STAY OFF the ruins... oops

                                                                                                                                

                         

                           Lake Pamvotis from downtown Ioannina looking out toward the mountains

Sheep crossing

Later we went to a Perama cave to check out the stalagmites and stalactites. It's an "active" cave so we couldn't take photos because we might disturb nature's natural processes, but I managed to find one online: 

                   

Perama Cave

On Sunday we headed to Meteora by bus through the mountains. It was a very strange experience because the road was a lot of tunnels varying in length (some up to 2.7 km) and when we came out of the tunnels cutting through the mountain the weather would have changed completely. We went from sunshine and green everywhere to snow covered trees in a matter of minutes. Then we would enter another tunnel and we came out into the densest fog I have ever seen. I don't know how we continued to drive at that point. We made it to the town of Kalambaka, which is where the monasteries are located. 

Now imagine you can see through the fog to the little monasteries sitting on top of these huge rocks.

These were an amazing site to see. Situated on the tops of rocks there are now only six monestaries remaining and still functioning. At one point there were 24, but many were destroyed during WWII. Starting around the ninth century hermits had begun living in the rocks in the cracks and crevices. How they got to the tops and built the actual monasteries I am still not sure. We had a lot of climbing to do to get there, but roads have been built today that will get you close. We went to two of the monasteries. The Holy Monastery of St. Stephen was built in 1545 and is run by nuns. The second and largest of all is The Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron, built in the mid 1300s. Only ten monks live there now and it is still the largest number of any of the monasteries. Prior to the 1990s the only want to reach it was by net (yes, net) and this cable they have strung from one rock to the next. Now they have a convenient set of very solid stairs you can take.

Great Meteoron and the stairs leading up to it

Being a monk is not a profession that is in high demand, hence the low numbers living in the monasteries. Their day consists of eight hours of prayer, eight hours of work, and eight hours of leisure (sleeping, hobby, etc). Once the monks die in the monastery there is very little space for burying them on the giant rock so they'll bury them only for seven years, allowing the body to decay, and then exhume it. Then they take the skeleton apart and they end up like this:

Yes, they are real. And yes they still do this.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the actual churches in the monasteries, but they were very ornate and colorful. Every inch of wall and ceiling was painted with vibrant scenes from the Bible in very great detail. We learned that this was how the illiterate learned about their religion, since they could not read it themselves.

The view from the top, looking down.