Meteora Agiou Nikolaou Anapafsa Monastery

Looking down on  Agios Nikolaos Anapafsa Monastery

By now we were nearing the end of visiting hours and we still had one monastery to go. Our guidebook says that Agios Nikolaos Anapafsa Monastery closes at 1530 but, happily, when we arrived at 1500 we found that it actually closes half an hour later.

Looking up at Agios Nikolaos Anapafsa Monastery   

That extra half an hour was much appreciated at the end of a mammoth stepathon day. It may be the smallest monastery but there were still a lot of steps to climb to get up to it. Inside, we found a lovely little katholicon with stunning frescoes on the walls, painted by the monk Theophanes Strelizas from Crete. Apparently the 1527 fresco, ‘The Naming of the Animals by Adam in Paradise’ is particularly highly thought of. We certainly thought it rather lovely but, again, we were not allowed to take photos.

Agiou Nikolaou Anapafsa is a small monastery with just one monk in residence. We wondered what would happen when that monk dies. Will the site be offered to an order of nuns as has happened at 2 of the other monasteries?

With our tour of the monasteries at an end we now had time to go back up the road to get a few more pictures of some of the other rock stacks in Meteora. Many of them are named, though the maps were not clear which is called what.

Some of the stacks in the background of these pictures at one time had monasteries on them too but these have since been abandoned and fallen into ruin. The pictured stacks in may, in the past, have provided homes for hermits – certainly some of them have a number of good-sized caves in them.

Kumaries needle stack   

Finally, we stopped briefly in the village of Kastraki where I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the needle stack, Kumaries. Unfortunately, our vantage point for the picture came complete with Hellenic Electricity Board cable and pylons. We’ve started to joke that if there’s a potentially good picture it’s guaranteed that the electricity company will have got there first and put up a cable, with multiple cables, ideally in a complicated criss-cross pattern, partially obscuring the best views! Kumaries features in a number of copper plate pictures of Meteora, clearly sans electricity cable. Maybe I’ll just have to resort to Photoshop…..

And so, after a restorative coffee, but still somewhat footsore, we headed back to BV via the Aegean motorway – good views of Mount Olympus but an expensive road with lots of tolls.

Meteora, Greece