Meteora

Meteora is by far one of the most amazing, surprising, beautiful places I have ever seen or even heard of. When we saw on the itinerary that we would be going to the Grand Meteoron Monastery of Meteora, we expected a beautiful building with a church. None of us expected this beautiful building to be on top of the coolest looking rock/mountains.

The monastery is in the center.

Our bus took us pretty high up, but even then we had to cross a bridge and climb up many stairs to get to the Greek Orthodox Monastery itself. Our History Professor and Director of the Rome Program (a man who gained all of our respect and admiration not only from the first week of school, but by organizing this trip as well) Dr. Hatlie introduced the monastery, telling us its history and cool facts about it. We then got to tour inside of it, and I'll be honest the room of skulls of previous monks and the icons of suffering martyrs inside the church creeped me out... but the sights, the architecture of the monastery, and the fact that this was all built on top of the coolest mountain ever, all made up for an extremely memorable experience.

Fortunately, I have plenty of pictures to share with you.

We climbed up the stairs (which look like a slanted Z). On the right you can sort of see a tower with a dangling basket. This was once how people would bring food and water up to the monks, when they would completely seclude themselves from society. The stairs were built later.

Slightly creepy skulls of previous monks.

We got to explore a bit on one of the cool rocks and to take pictures.
Maggie and me, looking happy but slightly awkward.