The monks who built Meteora chose six rock pillars three hundred metres above the plain of Thessaly in central Greece, and for most of the six hundred years since, there was no way up them at all. Goods and people went up in a net on a rope, and asked how often the rope was changed, a monk is said to have answered: only when it breaks. The rock-cut steps that let anyone walk up were added in the 1920s. The pillars are not carved cliffs. They are cemented river pebbles and sand, dumped where a delta once emptied into a lake and cut into towers as the land rose. The rounded stones still stud the faces, and you climb past them. At the top you pass through a low gate into a courtyard hung over the drop. The church inside is dark with candle smoke and painted wall to wall with Byzantine saints; a treasury holds icons and manuscripts the monks have kept for generations.
Twenty-four monasteries once stood here; six are still lived in, and two of those are convents. Between the pillars, old footpaths thread the wooded gorges from one rock to the next, past hermit caves and springs the coaches never reach. They bring you up to each monastery from underneath, which is how the monks first saw them. The rock is climbed for its own sake too, hundreds of routes on knobs and pockets of fossil river stone, though the monastery summits are left alone. In the evening you can join the crowd on the Psaropetra outcrop among the towers, where the low sun turns the west-facing pillars gold and lines them up one behind another. On cold, still mornings from November to February mist fills the plain and only the summits break the surface. The monasteries sit on cloud, and no summer visitor ever sees it. The windlasses are still there in their little rooms, with the old nets hanging beneath them, hauling up bread and timber now instead of people.