Rhapsody in Blue and White

 It's an absolute cliche, the smooth whitewashed walls of  Mykonos houses, the sparkling blue of the Aegean. It's marketable - on sale at a souvenir shop near you. 

Yet the colour of that place stimulates the senses right now in a way my favourite deep cedar forest cannot. And it definitely calls me on this crazy blustery rainy November day, prevailing colour - grey. So, here's some blue and white. 

Suspended in Air

 Some things defy description. And yet I'm about to try.

I recall a fascinating big old book in my high school library, filled with blue grey illustrations from old paintings or lithographs of the wonders of the ancient world.

 I have looked for this book often on Abe and Thrift booksellers, hoping to experience again the sheer wonder that I felt while browsing its pages, escaping the fractious high school realities just beyond Mrs. Rabnett's library doors. The hanging gardens of Babylon were in those pages, the Pyramids of Egypt, and I expect, the monasteries of Meteora.

A short month or so ago I visited the countryside of eroded sandstone conglomerate pinnacles above Kalambaka in Thessaly, northwestern Greece. Now, that alone would have broken my amateur geologist's heart. The landscape is formed of an ancient seabed, shrugged upward into a high plateau by the uneasy earth, then eroded along vertical fault lines by water and wind - a process covering sixty million years or so. This is a place to stop, to contemplate eternity and one's small moment in it. 

early Meteora cave retreats

This timeless place drew contemplatives to it over centuries. The (relatively) easy to work stone led 5th century monks fleeing the conquering Ottoman's persecution to scale the stone walls (we witnessed modern-day rock climbers, much better equipped, on the rock face) and live hermit lives in caves. In 1340, so the accounts go, a monk started building the first of what eventually became 24 monasteries atop the pinnacles. He named the place Meteora, "suspended in air", closer to God I suppose.

There's so much information online, including video tours - quality uneven. This one is short and close-captioned, sparing wind noise and tourist chatter. 

This post is struggling because I'm trying to share facts - history, geology, Eastern Orthodox spirituality and religious art - magnificent fresco, mosaic, gold-glittering icons. Some of the riches are on display in the basement museum. Of course, the church was off-limits to photos. 

But what I want to tell you about is awe. The utterly transcendent, strange, numinous beauty of the place. And maybe, for this post at least, all I can do is just this, post these glimpses in no particular order, and leave you here:

open to visitors on selected days

195 steps - modest dress code

until the 1920s steps everything and everyone
 was brought up by rope, basket, ladder, trust

museum in former refectory