Gruesome but saintly deaths

August 29, 2018

Holy Tinity

When we arrived in Meteora, the English speaking host of the villa said, if you've seen two or three of the monasteries, you will get the idea.

The guidebooks say you can do all six in one day, though this ambition is often confounded as the monasteries close on different days of the week. We're here for three whole days, so decided to do only a couple a day. Plus the idea of having to get up early and have a rushed breakfast to then dash around six different places in 8 hours does not fit in well with our holiday ontological disposition. Plus having a leisurely time means we have been able to work out how Kevin's new fangled camera works - at least some of it!

So today we headed back up and visited the first of the day's monasteries, Verlaam. Initially we drove past it to get some shots of it from the Great Meteoro monastery which was closed for the day.

The Verlaam monastery is reached by a bridge and a winding staircase. It was only later when we saw the bridge from the next monastery that we realised how precarious a position it was in.

Compared with the previous day when we had the Holy Trinity monastery virtually to ourselves, this was a shock. There were many cars and tour buses and the place was heaving. We of course adding to those numbers. Even getting up the steps was a battle - not helped by people suddenly stopping for no reason or to take selfies. We were very curmudgeonly!

The monastery itself was pristine with ornate brickwork. It was quite a wait to visit the chapel as they are small and if one coach tour is in it, it is already full.

We saw some monks, some in tall conical hats taking selfies. We visited the winch are and saw a huge barrel that held 12,000 litres of water.

From the monastery you got great views of the next visiting site, the nunnery of Roussanou.

Roussanou is dedicated to St Barbara, who amongst other things is the Patron saint of coalminers. The site was tiny with gardens reached by steps and a bridge. There was a great viewpoint to the higher monasteries and you could see the ruins of derelict sites from there.

Photos inside were strictly forbidden. There were displays of old and modern iconography and a great cartoon-like sketch of Meteora, with monks climbing ladders and hauling up goods. Joan wanted a copy of this as a souvenir for the Gin Palace but sadly there were none on sale.

The chapel or katholikon was covered in gruesome illustrations of Christian saints - beheadings, throat slittings, being stoned, eaten by animals, crushed to death, being burned alive. It's hard to believe in rationalism and modernity when such atrocities are so prelavent still.

Allegedly the nunnery holds some relics of St Barbara. A tour lead by a priest came in and led them in prayer and song.

One of the nuns was painting rocks as souvenirs, reminding us of the rocking craze in Bolsover at the moment.

Back down, we returned home via Lidl and ate an aubergine and pasta bake on the balcony.