Meteora Varlaam Monastery

Varlaam Monastery (left, foreground) with Megalo Meteora Monastery behind   

The rock on which Varlaam Monastery is built was first settled by a hermit monk, Varlaam, in 1350. He built 3 churches, a cell and a water tank [Ed: goodness knows how!] but the site was abandoned after his death. Almost 2 centuries later, two rich priest-monks, Theophanes and Nektarios Apsarades from Ioanina, climbed the rock and founded a monastery. The brothers renovated Varlaam's church of the Three Hierarchs, erected the tower, and built a katholikon dedicated to All Saints. Using ropes, pulleys and baskets, it took 22 years to hoist all the building materials to the top of the rock. Once everything was at the top, allegedly the construction work took only 20 days [Ed: Maybe we should be looking up monks not builders in the yellow pages when we want to get construction work done on our house].

Getting up to the monastery these days is much easier, thanks to the bridge across the chasm from which steps carved into the face of the rock stack lead up to the monastery on the top. For the monks and particularly favoured visitors, there is also the ‘monks’ cable car’, seen above in action.

When we visited there was a lot of building work going on; it seemed that the main courtyard was being extended or perhaps they were just improving the wall around the edge. Either way, the pulley basket system was getting plenty of use taking building materials up. The current hoist is electrically operated. If they could see it I’d guess that the Apsarades brothers would be wishing they could have had something similar – it would have shaved years off their construction schedule.

Varlaam is the second largest monastery in the Metéora complex and in 2015 had the largest number of monks (7) of the male monasteries. [Ed: by way of comparison the 2 convents had a total of 41 nuns between them in 2015.] The church or katholicon (again, no photos permitted inside) has highly frescoed walls and a couple of silver reliquary boxes, perhaps containing the finger of St John and the shoulder blade of St Andrew, since these relics were said to have been brought to the monastery when it was founded.

In what had been a storeroom, close to the hoist/basket area, a huge barrel is on display. If we understood the signs correctly, this was a huge wine barrel with a capacity of 12,000 litres. One can only hope that they used good corks to stopper it. With that volume of wine inside it would have been very sad to open it up for a first tasting only to find it corked!

Varlaam monastery with Roussanou behind   

As we left Varlaam, we again marvelled at just how the monks had managed to build these large buildings in such inaccessible sites in the first place.

And then, as we returned to the car, we saw the remains of a religious painting on one of the rock stacks, high, high up above the valley floor and underneath a slight overhang. Presumably created well before the era of modern climbing equipment, we wondered exactly how they had positioned themselves to do the painting and how concerned they were about working in such a precarious and exposed position.

Meteora, Greece