# The Sky Monastery: every page

The pages of https://skymonastery.com, one after another. The list alone: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt

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# The Sky Monastery

A lavra on the Broad Rock, above the sea of cloud

Climb the stair to a living house on a pillar of rock. Its brethren keep the offices, bake the bread, copy books and tend the vines through a day that never stops. Then read of Meteora in Thessaly, where monks have lived on such rocks since the fourteenth century.

[Walk in Climb the last of the stair and go through the gate.](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)
[Begin with the ascent How anyone ever got up: the net, the windlass and the stair.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/ascent/)

What is happening in the house at this moment (the hour, the office being kept, the next meal, the season): [/now.md](https://skymonastery.com/now.md).

The ascent

## At Meteora, travellers were hauled up the cliff in a net

![The windlass in the Sky Monastery's winch tower, the roof cut away, its hoist door open on the air](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-winch.webp)

**The winch tower of the Sky Monastery** The great windlass of the stores. What the house cannot grow comes up forty-six metres of rope in the net.
[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=stores)

![Engraving of a Meteora monastery on its rock, with a timber hoist house overhanging a cliff in the foreground](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-wordsworth-monastery.webp)

**The tower of the windlass at Meteora** A hoist house hangs over the cliff at the left of this plate from Christopher Wordsworth's *Greece*, in the edition of 1882.
[Read the ascent ›](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/ascent/)

## The essays

![The gatehouse of the Sky Monastery, cut open](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-gate.webp)

### [The ascent](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/ascent/)

**In the house:** the gate stair and the winch tower.

**At Meteora:** the net, the windlass and the capstan.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=gate)

![The gilded icon screen of the katholikon](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-katholikon.webp)

### [The church](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/church/)

**In the house:** the Katholikon of the Transfiguration and the phiale.

**At Meteora:** four columns, a dome, and the painted walls.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=katholikon)

![The ossuary under the church, its shelves of skulls behind iron grilles](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-ossuary.webp)

### [The bones](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/bones/)

**In the house:** the vestibule of the tombs, the ossuary and the crypt.

**At Meteora and Athos:** three years in the earth, then a name on the brow.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=ossuary)

![The bell tower and its great dial](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-clock.webp)

### [The hours](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hours/)

**In the house:** the house clock, the bells and the board of notices.

**At Meteora and Athos:** the wooden board, the iron hoop and the call at midnight.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=clock)

![The Hall of Wisdom, the library with its long table and globes](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-library.webp)

### [The books](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/books/)

**In the house:** the scriptorium and the Hall of Wisdom.

**At Meteora:** a library behind a cupboard, and the Gospels sold and given back.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=library)

![The refectory tables laid under painted saints](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-refectory.webp)

### [Bread and wine](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/table/)

**In the house:** the Great Hall, the kitchen, the bakehouse and the winery.

**At Meteora and Athos:** a kitchen all chimney, a table in an apse, a great barrel.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=refectory)

![The old hermits' house on the ledge, one cell and a walled yard](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-hermits.webp)

### [The hermits](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hermits/)

**In the house:** the old hermits' house and the hermits' path.

**At Meteora:** the men who lived in the caves before the monasteries.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=hermits)

![The vineyard rows either side of the vine walk](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-vineyard.webp)

### [The year](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/year/)

**In the house:** the vineyard and the kitchen garden through their seasons.

**At Athos and Meteora:** a feast on a mountain top, and the fast at the abbot's table.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=vineyard)

![Lithograph of a dark pillar of rock at Meteora with a net hanging on a rope from the monastery at its top](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-dupre1827.webp)

> “They began slowly ascending into the air, twisting round and round like a leg of mutton hanging to a bottle-jack. The rope was old and mended, and the height from the ground to the door above was, we afterwards learned, 37 fathoms, or 222 feet.”
>
> — Robert Curzon at the monastery of Barlaam, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849. The lithograph is by Louis Dupré, 1827. [See our net come up ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=stores)

## The travellers

Before photographs, Meteora reached the world in the sketchbooks of those who made the journey.

![Engraving of the monastery of Barlaam on its rock above a ravine](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-hughes1820.webp)

**Monastery of Barlaam, on one of the rocks of Meteora**T. S. Hughes, 1820.

![Lithograph of a pillar of rock with a net hanging from the monastery](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-dupre1827.webp)

**Meteora**Louis Dupré, lithograph, 1827.

![Engraving of the monastery of St Barlaam on its pillar, travellers below](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-barlaam.webp)

**View of the monastery of St Barlaam, at Meteora**Robert Curzon, 1849.

![Engraving of the great monastery of Meteora seen across the pillars](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-great.webp)

**The Great Monastery of Meteora, from the monastery of Barlaam**Robert Curzon, 1849, from a drawing made on the spot by Viscount Eastnor.

![Engraving of a monastery perched on a cliff at Meteora](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-wordsworth-cliffs.webp)

**Cliffs at Meteora**Christopher Wordsworth, *Greece*, edition of 1882.

![Engraving of the valley and pillars of Meteora](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-wordsworth-general.webp)

**General view of Meteora**Christopher Wordsworth, *Greece*, edition of 1882.

![Coloured lithograph of the rocks of Meteora rising over the plain](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-stackelberg.webp)

## The six houses that remain

Six monasteries still keep the hours on the rocks: the Great Meteoron, Varlaam, Roussanou, St Nicholas Anapafsas, St Stephen and Holy Trinity. Each as a traveller found it in 1849.

[The six houses ›](https://skymonastery.com/monasteries/)

They are living communities, not museums. For their hours and what they ask of guests, go to each house's own word.

Lithograph after O. M. von Stackelberg, 19th century.

## The gate is open. The porter keeps water and bread at his window.

[Walk in ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)

---

Walk a living monastery on a pillar of rock above the cloud, and read of Meteora in Thessaly, where monks have lived on such rocks since the fourteenth century.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


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The first essay

# The ascent

A house on a pillar of rock has one question before all others: how does anyone get up?

![Lithograph of a dark pillar of rock at Meteora with a net hanging on a rope from the monastery at its top](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-dupre1827.webp)

Meteora, with the net on its rope. Lithograph by Louis Dupré, 1827.

In the Sky Monastery the answer hangs over the east rim. The winch tower stands out past the edge of the rock, and in its upper room is the great windlass of the stores: a drum as thick as a man, turned by a wheel taller than one. What the house cannot grow comes up forty-six metres of rope in the net, and out of the hoist door there is nothing but air.

The net was not our invention. It is in the books of the travellers who went to Meteora before there were roads to it, and the best of them on this matter is Robert Curzon, who came hunting manuscripts and published what befell him in 1849.

![The windlass in the Sky Monastery's winch tower, the roof cut away, its hoist door open on the air](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-winch.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The winch tower

Stand in the winch room beside the drum, look out of the hoist door, and see who is at work in the stores below.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=stores)

## A leg of mutton on a bottle-jack

Curzon reached the foot of the monastery of Barlaam with an escort that did not please the monk at the door above. At length a thin cord came down, and he tied to it a letter of introduction he had brought from Corfu. After some delay a much larger rope followed, with a hook at its end and a strong net on the hook. His two servants sat down on the net and went first.

> “The four corners being attached to the hook, a signal was made, and they began slowly ascending into the air, twisting round and round like a leg of mutton hanging to a bottle-jack. The rope was old and mended, and the height from the ground to the door above was, we afterwards learned, 37 fathoms, or 222 feet.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XIX

At the top he watched two stout monks reach out of the door and pull the servants in by main force, there being, he noted, no contrivance like a turning-crane to bring them nearer the landing. The whole business looked so dangerous that he made up his mind to climb instead.

![Engraving of the monastery of Barlaam on its rock above a deep ravine](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-hughes1820.webp)

**Monastery of Barlaam, on one of the rocks of Meteora.** T. S. Hughes, 1820.

![Engraving of the monastery of St Barlaam on its pillar, with travellers at its foot](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-barlaam.webp)

**View of the monastery of St Barlaam, at Meteora.** From Curzon's own book, 1849.

![Engraving of a Meteora monastery on its rock, a timber hoist house overhanging a cliff in the foreground](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-wordsworth-monastery.webp)

**Monastery of Meteora,** with a hoist house over the void. Christopher Wordsworth, *Greece*, edition of 1882.

## Ten or twelve at the bars

Going down, he had no choice. The monks and the abbot gathered in the room where the capstan stood, and ten or twelve of them took their places at the bars. The net was spread on the floor; he sat down on it cross-legged; the four corners were gathered over his head and hooked to the rope. A few steps round by the monks lifted him off the floor and, in his words, launched him out of the door right into the sky. The abbot and another monk leaned out to steady the swinging, and he was let down slowly and gently to the ground.

He lists what stood on Barlaam's summit, an acre and a half of it: the church and a smaller chapel, the refectory, the kitchen, the tower of the windlass, and the separate buildings where the monks lived, of whom there were then only fourteen. The Sky Monastery's rock carries the same things.

The same day he went on to the great monastery. He fired a gun at the foot of the precipice, long-bearded monks looked him over from above, and a rope with a net came down about twenty-five fathoms. That is a hundred and fifty feet, or very nearly the forty-six metres the Sky Monastery's net travels.

> “I was lugged in at the window by two of the strongest of the brethren, and after having been dragged along the floor and unpacked, I was presented to the admiring gaze of the whole reverend community, who were assembled round the capstan.”
>
> — Curzon at the great monastery of Meteora, chapter XX

![Engraving of the great monastery of Meteora seen across the pillars from Barlaam, the river Peneus beyond](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-great.webp)

**The Great Monastery of Meteora, from the monastery of Barlaam, with the river Peneus in the distance.** From a drawing made on the spot by Viscount Eastnor; Curzon, 1849.

## And the stair

Guests of the Sky Monastery are spared the net. They come up a stair cut down the face of the cliff, to a gatehouse at its head where every arrival stops first at the icon of the Mother of God, keeper of the gate. The porter keeps water and bread at his window for those who have climbed. The windlass is left to the flour, the oil and the salt.

At Meteora the nets gave way in the 1920s, when steps were cut into the rock and the houses were joined to the plateau beside them by a bridge. It is by those steps that the monasteries are reached today.

In the house, at this hour

## The great gate

Arrive as a guest does: in the gate passage, before the icon, with the porter's window at your side.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=gate)

![The Sky Monastery's gatehouse cut open: the gate passage, the icon and its lamp](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-gate.webp)

**What is invented.** The Broad Rock, its winch tower and its forty-six metres belong to the Sky Monastery. The net, the hook, the capstan and the monks at its bars are Curzon's, as he saw them at Barlaam and the great monastery.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapters XIX and XX, read in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive. Plates from Curzon; T. S. Hughes (1820); Louis Dupré (1827); and Christopher Wordsworth's *Greece* (edition of 1882), by way of Wikimedia Commons. The cutting of the steps in the 1920s is from the article on Meteora at Wikipedia.

[The next essay The church › Four columns for the Evangelists, a dome for heaven, and the terrors kept to the porch.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/church/)

## No net is needed. Climb the last of the stair and go through the gate.

[Walk in ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)

---

How anyone ever got up the rocks of Meteora: Robert Curzon hauled up in a net in 1849, and the windlass of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/ascent/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


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The second essay

# The church

Everything in it means something: the four columns, the dome they carry, the screen of icons, and the terrors painted where the brethren leave them at the door.

![Wall painting of the Transfiguration: Christ in white within a blue glory, Moses and Elijah beside him, three apostles fallen on the rocks below](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-transfiguration.webp)

The Transfiguration, a wall painting at Meteora in the monastery that bears its name. Public domain, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The great church of a monastery is its katholikon, and the rest of the house is arranged about it. In the Sky Monastery it stands on a podium on the highest ground of the rock, and it is the one room that can hold the whole brotherhood at once. It is dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Saviour, as is the katholikon of the Great Meteoron, the oldest and largest of the houses on the rocks of Thessaly.

Athanasios the Meteorite founded the Great Meteoron in the middle of the fourteenth century. A church was raised there in the second half of that century by the monk Joasaph, who had been a prince, and a part of its wall still stands inside the larger church built in the middle of the sixteenth, which was then painted throughout.

![The nave of the Sky Monastery's katholikon cut open from above: marble columns, an inlaid floor, the gilded screen and the brethren's stalls](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-church-cut.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The Katholikon of the Transfiguration

Stand in the nave under the dome. The bronze choros hangs over you, and it is lit and swung at Orthros, Vespers and Compline.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=katholikon)

## Four columns and a dome

Robert Curzon, who was hauled up to the monastery of Barlaam in a net, went into its church the next morning and set down what he saw. It was dedicated to All Saints, its walls covered on every side with holy personages, and its plan is printed in his book: a square nave on four columns, with a rounded apse to the east and one to either side for the two choirs.

> “Everything is symbolical in the Eastern Church; and these symbols have been in use from the very earliest ages of Christianity. The four columns which support the dome represent the four Evangelists; and the dome itself is the symbol of heaven, to which access has been given to mankind by the glad tidings of the Gospels which they wrote.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XIX

The nave of the Sky Monastery is built to the same reading. Four great marble columns carry a high drum dome. Christ the Pantokrator looks down from it, the prophets stand round the drum, and the four Evangelists are painted in the pendentives, where the columns' weight is gathered. The two choirs sing from rounded bays to north and south, as at Barlaam, and eighteen stalls line the walls, one for every brother.

![A small engraved plan of a church: a square nave with four columns, three rounded apses and a porch on two more columns](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-plan.webp)

**Plan of the church at Barlaam,** from Curzon's book, 1849: four columns under the dome, and an apse for each choir.

![Looking up into the painted vaults and dome of the church at Varlaam, a brass lamp hanging on its chain](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-varlaam-interior.webp)

**The vaults and the dome at Varlaam,** painted on every surface. Photograph by Nanosanchez, 2009, public domain.

![Wall painting of Christ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, the apostles behind him and the people of the city before](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-gm-entry.webp)

**The Entry into Jerusalem,** a wall painting in the monastery of the Great Meteoron. Public domain, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

## The screen and its three doors

Between the nave and the altar stands the iconostasis, the screen of icons. Curzon found it at Barlaam much as it stands in any Greek church:

> “…the altar or holy table … is separated from the nave by a wooden screen, called the iconostasis, on which are paintings of the Blessed Virgin, the Redeemer, and many saints. These pictures are kissed by all who enter the church. The iconostasis has three doors in it; one in the centre, before the holy table, and one on each side.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XIX

Beyond it is the sanctuary, which he calls typical of the holy of holies of the Temple, its veil the curtain of the centre door. None but the priests and the deacon who trims the lamps go in, and they pass by the side doors; the centre one is used only in the liturgy.

The screen of the Sky Monastery runs the full width of the nave in three tiers of carved and gilded walnut: the great icons below, the feasts of the year above them, and the apostles turned toward Christ under the crowning cross. Its royal doors stay closed except in the liturgy, and the brethren who serve go in by the deacon doors on either side.

In the house, at this hour

## The lite

The low, dark room before the nave, with the candle desk by the door and the nave's light beyond it.

[Stand in the church ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=katholikon)

![Looking from the dark lite of the Sky Monastery's church through its door to the lit nave, the choros and the gilded screen, a monk standing in the doorway](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-lite.webp)

## The terrors at the door

Before the nave of an Orthodox church comes a narthex or a porch, and it is there that the painters put what is hardest to look at. At Barlaam the porch stood on marble columns, and the wall on each side of the door was painted with the Last Judgment and the tortures of the condemned, “with a liberal allowance of flames and devils”.

> “These pictures of the torments of the wicked are always placed outside the body of the church, as typical of the unhappy state of those who are out of its pale: they are never seen within.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XIX

At the great monastery he found the brethren sitting to talk of an evening in a large open porch painted in bright colours with the martyrdoms of saints, “very hairy and very holy, and so like the old caloyers themselves, who were discoursing before them, that they might have been taken for their portraits”. Curzon did not much care for Greek painting, and said so at length. The sixteenth-century paintings of that church are now counted among the best of their age in Greece.

The Sky Monastery keeps the old order. Its lite, the inner narthex, is low and dark and painted with the Last Judgement. A brother passes through it to reach the nave, and leaves it behind him.

## The water before the door

In the court before the church stands the phiale, the basin where the waters are blessed. The Sky Monastery's is older than the house: a round Roman temple of eight columns, one of them replaced in porphyry by the brethren.

![The phiale of the Sky Monastery: a round basin with a fountain between white marble columns, on a mosaic floor](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-phiale.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The phiale

Eight columns round a basin, in the court to the south of the church.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=phiale)

**What is invented.** The Katholikon of the Transfiguration on the Broad Rock, its columns, its screen, its lite and its Roman phiale belong to the Sky Monastery. The churches of Barlaam and the great monastery are as Curzon saw them.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapters XIX and XX, in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive. The founding of the Great Meteoron, the dedication of its katholikon and its two building phases are from the articles on Meteora and the Great Meteoron at Wikipedia and the account at visitmeteora.travel; these want a scholarly source before they are relied on further. The photographs and the plan are from Wikimedia Commons.

[The next essay The bones › Under the church lie the fathers' bones after their three years in the earth, each skull with his name written on the brow.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/bones/)

## The choros is lit for Orthros, Vespers and Compline.

[Walk in to the church ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=katholikon)

---

The painted churches of Meteora, as Robert Curzon read them in 1849: four columns for the Evangelists, a dome for heaven, the Last Judgment kept to the porch. And the katholikon of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/church/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


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The third essay

# The bones

A monk is buried twice: once in the earth, and three years later on a shelf among his brothers, with his name written on his brow.

![Rows of monks' skulls on wooden shelves at Meteora, small icons and a hanging lamp above them](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-skulls.webp)

The skulls of the fathers on their shelves at Meteora. Photograph by P. León, 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

A rock has little earth on it. A house that has stood for centuries on a summit of an acre or two has buried many more brothers than it has graves for, and the Greek monasteries answered that long ago. The grave is lent, not given. When its time is up the brother's bones are lifted, and the grave is ready for the next.

Visitors to the Great Meteoron are shown the result today: a room where the skulls of the monks who lived on the rock stand in rows on wooden shelves, under a lamp. It is not a curiosity to the brethren. It is where their predecessors are, and where they will be.

## Three years in the earth

The fullest old account in English comes from Mount Athos, the monks' peninsula in the north of Greece. Athelstan Riley travelled there and published what he saw in 1887. From his window at the monastery of Vatopedi he could see the cemetery, and wondered how so small a plot served so many.

> “…the invariable custom which prevails here, and generally amongst the Greeks, of digging up the bodies three years after burial; the skulls are then neatly labelled with the names of the owners and the dates of their deaths, and placed in the crypt of the cemetery church, whilst the other bones are thrown confusedly into a large chest. The crypt at Vatopedi contains 3,000 skulls.”
>
> — Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks*, 1887, pp. 47–48

The dead were buried without coffins, he adds, and another brother was laid in the same place when the first was lifted.

![The ossuary of the Sky Monastery: a limewashed vault, a lamp, and arched bays of oak shelves holding rows of skulls with long bones stacked beneath](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-ossuary-wall.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The ossuary

Under the lite lie the fathers' bones after their three years in the earth. Each skull is on the shelves with his name and the year written on the brow, and the long bones lie in the bins below.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=ossuary)

## Shelves, clean and nicely painted

At the Russian monastery on Athos, where three hundred monks ate their dinner of vegetables in silence, Riley was taken to the burial ground, about twenty yards square, and to its little church. It stood on a hill just outside the walls, and he could see from his window monks constantly going up to it.

> “On one side of the church are long shelves of a considerable depth, clean and nicely painted, and on these skulls of departed brethren are neatly arranged, to the number, we were told, of 1,500. On another side arm and leg bones are stacked, and at the entrance stand two great boxes about half full of the smaller bones.”
>
> — Riley, p. 254

The ossuary of the Sky Monastery is laid out the same way. A single limewashed vault runs under the lite of the church, and its west wall is cut back into six arched niches. One hundred and seventeen fathers stand on dark oak shelves in the order of their years, a front rank and a back rank, and the long bones are stacked in the bins beneath. Eight hegumens have a niche of their own behind an iron grille, each on his red stole. The north bay is filled to its arch with the bones of those whose names are gone.

![Skulls on oak shelves in the Sky Monastery's ossuary, a strip of names lettered in Greek along the front of each shelf](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-skulls.webp)

**The shelves.** Each father's name is lettered where he stands.

![The crypt of the Sky Monastery cut open from above: four great piers, a tomb under a red pall, and icons on the walls](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-crypt.webp)

**The crypt,** under the nave on four great piers, with the tomb of the two brothers who built the house.

![A marble sarcophagus under a red pall, carved with a cross between two peacocks](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-tomb.webp)

**The builders' tomb:** a cross between two peacocks drinking from a fountain, under a red pall.

## A name on the brow

In another cemetery chapel on the Mountain, at the Serai, the skulls were piled in rows, each labelled with the name and age of its owner and the date of his death. Some were kept in little wooden boxes with lids. The priest who showed Riley round opened one.

> “…one of these skulls Philemon took out of its receptacle and handled lovingly. He gave us to understand that it belonged to a great friend of his, who had died three years back; and there upon the bleached forehead was written his name. The good priest heaved a little sigh, put the skull back into its box, crossed himself, and led us out of the chapel.”
>
> — Riley, p. 280

The Sky Monastery writes the name and the year on the brow in the same way. By the east wall of its ossuary stand a stone basin, a copper jug and a folded linen cloth, for the house washes a brother's bones in wine before it sets him on the shelf. The bier leans beside the door.

## Remember your end

Riley, an Englishman, called the bone houses barbarous before he defended them:

> “It is the fashion to labour to forget death and to live as much as possible in the present; but to call before our eyes our own death-beds each time we hear a passing bell, to cultivate the thought of our own dissolutions whenever we hear of a friend's departure or look upon a sepulchre—these are not dangerous and morbid exercises, but rather pious and laudable customs…”
>
> — Riley, p. 280

The house on the Broad Rock says it more shortly. Over the door of its ossuary, on the side a brother sees as he goes in, is cut in Greek: *Remember your end.* On the wall facing him, over the icon of the Resurrection and its lamp: *We were as you are; you will be as we are.* A stone bench runs along the east wall, where anyone may sit with the fathers.

At the south end of the wall is a small niche with an empty oak shelf, the oldest name-plate in the room beneath it, Abba Elias's, and a clay lamp that is always lit. Why his place stands empty is a question the house leaves for its guests.

In the house, at this hour

## The vestibule of the tombs

A low vaulted room at the foot of the round stair under the church. A lamp burns before the diptychs, the books of the names of the departed, read at every memorial.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=tombs)
[Or go on to the crypt ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=crypt)

![The long vault of the ossuary, lit by a single lamp, its bays of shelves behind iron grilles](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-ossuary.webp)

**What is invented.** The ossuary, the crypt and every father named in them belong to the Sky Monastery, as do the two inscriptions and the empty shelf. The custom is real, and so are the shelves of the Great Meteoron.

**Where this comes from.** Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks* (London, 1887), pp. 47–48, 254 and 280, in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive. Riley describes Mount Athos, not Meteora; that the same custom is kept on the rocks rests here on the ossuary shown to visitors at the Great Meteoron [a written source for the custom at Meteora itself is still to be found].

[The next essay The hours › A board of good wood and a mallet, the bells, and the call at midnight.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hours/)

## A lamp burns before the icon of the Resurrection.

[Walk in to the ossuary ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=ossuary)

---

Why a Greek monastery keeps its dead on shelves: three years in the earth, then a name written on the brow. Athelstan Riley among the charnel houses of Athos in 1887, and the ossuary of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/bones/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hours/ -->

The fourth essay

# The hours

Before a monastery had bells it had a board of good wood and a mallet, and it is the board that still wakes the brethren.

![A bearded monk striking a row of hanging metal plates with two small mallets](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-semantron.webp)

A monk playing a semantron. Photograph by Rklawton, 2005, CC BY 3.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

A monastery's day is not kept by the sun or by the brethren's own wish, but by a sound. Something is struck, and every brother puts down what he has in his hand and goes to the church. The Greek houses have three things to strike: a long wooden board, an iron one, and bells.

Athelstan Riley, travelling among the monasteries of Mount Athos, photographed a group of monks under an archway at Vatopedi with the wooden one hanging over their heads, and stopped to explain it to his English readers.

> “This is nothing more than a board of sound and good wood; on being struck with a hammer it produces a resonant noise, which can be heard a very long distance. The semantron is used at Athos instead of bells for calling to prayer, and was formerly universally employed by the Eastern Christians.”
>
> — Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks*, 1887, p. 90

Bells, he says, were first brought in the year 865, when the Venetians presented twelve to the emperor Michael III.

![The foot of the Sky Monastery's bell tower cut open: the candle workshop with its dipping wheel and hearth, and the stair up the tower](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-shop.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The bell tower

At the foot of the tower the chandler dips and rolls the tapers. The bell ropes come down into the middle of his workshop.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=belltower)

## Three blows, and round the church

There are two wooden semantra, Riley goes on: the large fixed ones and those carried in the hand. He watched the smaller one played before every service.

> “Before each service one of the monks takes a hand semantron, and, standing before the west end of the catholicon, strikes on it three hard and distinct blows with the little wooden mallet. He then proceeds round the outside of the church, playing on the semantron by striking blows of varying force on different parts of the wood at uneven intervals, always winding up the ‘tune’ with three blows similar to those at the beginning.”
>
> — Riley, p. 90

The third kind is of iron, “in the form of a half-hoop”, hung by chains in the porch of the church or among the bells in the tower, and sounding somewhat like them.

The Sky Monastery has all three. The great wooden semantron and the iron one hang in the open porch along the west front of the katholikon. In the tower are three bronze bells on oak headstocks: the great bell, named for the Mother of God, cast in Venice and carried up the rock in the net, with the Forerunner and St Nicholas on either side of it. The great bell's voice carries to every rim of the summit.

![The belfry of the Sky Monastery cut open: three bronze bells on their wheels under the tiled roof](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-belfry.webp)

**The belfry.** Three bells on oak headstocks, the great bell in the middle.

![Inside the foot of the bell tower: three bell ropes with striped grips hanging in the lamplight](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-ropes.webp)

**The ropes** come down through the ringer's room into the workshop below.

![The bell tower from the north square, the great dial on its face](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-clock.webp)

**The dial** on the tower's north face shows the hour of the house clock.

## The board at midnight

The hardest of the hours is the one kept in the dark. “Every night at twelve o'clock the semantron sounds for the night offices,” Riley wrote, “and although I am not a light sleeper it constantly woke me up.” Long before him Robert Curzon, a guest of the great monastery at Meteora, slept through the same call. He had rolled himself into a corner of the guest chamber and was asleep at once,

> “nor did the dull, monotonous sound of the mallet, which, struck on a suspended board, called the good brethren to midnight prayer, disturb me for more than a moment.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XX

The Sky Monastery is gentler with its brethren. They sleep from nine until five, and Orthros, the morning office, begins at half past five, with the Liturgy following straight upon it. The ecclesiarch, who keeps the church, strikes the iron semantron a little before Orthros, before Vespers and before Compline. So the founders left it. The ringing is written as a table in the Church Book, and the council of the house may move it as it may move any hour.

## The clock in the tower

Halfway up the tower, in the ringer's room, stands the house clock. Weights of field stone drive it, and it strikes every hour on a little bell of its own. Brother Kallinikos the chandler, who makes the candles at the tower's foot and rings its bells, winds it each morning. In the north square below is the hour stone, where the dial is read, and beside it the board on which the council posts the hours of the day.

The whole of the house's time, with its day, its year and its seasons, is set out in [the calendar, the clock and the seasons](https://skymonastery.com/calendar/).

In the house, at this hour

## The hour stone

Stand in the north square where the dial is read. The board of notices is a few steps away.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=clock)
[Or read the board ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=notices)

![The bell tower and its great dial seen from the north square](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-clock.webp)

**What is invented.** The bell tower, its three bells, its clock and its chandler belong to the Sky Monastery, as do the hours it keeps. The semantra are as Riley saw and heard them on Athos, and the midnight board is Curzon's at Meteora.

**Where this comes from.** Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks* (London, 1887), pp. 90–91; Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapter XX, pp. 301–302. Both in public-domain scans at the Internet Archive. The year 865 for the first bells is Riley's own statement.

[The next essay The books › A library behind a cupboard, and the Gospels that were sold and given back.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/books/)

## Wait a little in the court, and something will be struck.

[Walk in to the bell tower ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=belltower)

---

How a Greek monastery is called to prayer: a wooden board struck with a mallet, an iron hoop, and bells. Athelstan Riley woken at midnight on Athos in 1887, Robert Curzon at Meteora, and the bell tower of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hours/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/meteora/books/ -->

The fifth essay

# The books

The travellers who were hauled up the rocks in nets had mostly come for one thing: the old books the monks kept and could no longer read.

![The Hall of Wisdom in the Sky Monastery: a long reading table, two globes, red columns and book cases to the ceiling](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-library.webp)

The Hall of Wisdom, the library of the Sky Monastery.

Robert Curzon was a collector, and makes no secret of it. He went from monastery to monastery through Egypt, the Holy Land, Meteora and Athos with gold in his bag, asking to see the library. At Barlaam the abbot showed him about a thousand volumes, most of them printed in Venice, and between one and two hundred manuscripts, all books of divinity. Two he wanted badly: a Bulgarian folio he could not read, and a Gospels with pictures of the eleventh century. The monks would sell neither.

> “It was of no use to the monks themselves, who cannot read either Hellenic or ancient Greek; but they consider the books in their library as sacred relics, and preserve them with a certain feeling of awe for their antiquity and incomprehensibility.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XIX

The old abbot, he says, pitched the two books back into the dusty corner he had taken them from, where mice and mildew were actively at work.

## Behind the cupboard

At the great monastery the next day the books were harder to find.

> “The books are preserved in a range of low-vaulted and secret rooms, very well concealed in a sort of mezzanine: the entrance to them is through a door at the back of a cupboard in an outer chamber.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XX

There were about two thousand volumes on the shelves and some hundreds of manuscripts, nearly all of them service books. Then the librarian, an old grey-bearded monk, opened a great chest where the things of the church were kept, and in it were ten or twelve Gospels on vellum of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. One was a large quarto, and one of the most beautiful books of its kind, he wrote, that he had met with anywhere. Another was small, written in a very clear hand, and bound in silver filigree as old as the book itself.

![The library of the Sky Monastery cut open from above: a gallery on red columns round a hall of book cases, a brass chandelier and a globe](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-library-cut.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The Hall of Wisdom

Inlaid walnut cases on every wall, a gallery on six red columns, and the purple Gospel on the great lectern in the oriel over the abyss.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=library)

## Sold, and given back

The abbot agreed to sell him the two Gospels. Curzon counted out the gold and packed the books in his bag. He was waiting in the court to be lowered in the net when the librarian demanded half the money. The abbot refused, the librarian told the brethren that the abbot had pocketed the price of their common property, and the whole community fell to quarrelling, “chattering, gesticulating, and wagging their long beards”. At last the abbot said that if he could not keep the money for the use of the house he would have nothing to do with it.

> “To my great sorrow I was therefore obliged to receive it back, and to give up the two beautiful manuscripts, which I had already looked upon as the chief ornaments of my library in England.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XX

The bag was opened and the books taken out. Curzon sat down on a stone in the courtyard and turned the gilded leaves once more, the monks standing round him, looking at “the blue cypress-trees, and green and gold peacocks, and intricate arabesques, so characteristic of the best times of Byzantine art”. Then he laid the great book on the stone, set the little silver one on top of it, and left them there with the sun shining on them.

He thought it a loss all round. The books stayed on the rock.

![Eight lines of small, neat Greek handwriting with two red initials in the margin](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-ebnerianus.webp)

**A few lines of the Codex Ebnerianus,** the manuscript at Oxford to which Curzon compared the great book he was shown. Facsimile of 1856, public domain.

![Sloping desks with open books under tall windows in the copying room of the Sky Monastery](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-scriptorium.webp)

**The copying room.** Desks under the east windows, where the light is best.

![The scriptorium cut open from above: a whitewashed upper room with desks and shelves, beside the brick church](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-scriptorium-cut.webp)

**The scriptorium,** a timber-framed room jettied over the lane behind the church.

## Where the books are made

The Sky Monastery still makes its books. Behind the apse of the church stands the scriptorium. On its ground floor the sheets are ruled and the quires hung to dry; in the copying room above, three brethren copy and illuminate under the east windows. The colours they paint with are grown in one of the four beds of the garden cloister next door. Each afternoon the finished books are carried across to the library.

The library stands on the west rim, facing the bell tower across the square. Over its door is written in Greek *a place of healing for the soul*. Brother Sophronios the librarian keeps it and sleeps in its tower, and at the very top, up a ladder, is the Room of the Ancients, with iron-bound chests and jars of papyri.

The books of this house are not relics. The Rule, the minutes of the council and the book of each office are written by the brethren day by day, and a guest may open any of them and read what the house decided this morning.

In the house, at this hour

## The scriptorium

Where the books are made. The finished books go across to the library each afternoon.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=scriptorium)
[Or see where the colours grow ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=cloister)

![The copying room of the Sky Monastery, desks and open books under the windows](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-scriptorium.webp)

**What is invented.** The scriptorium, the Hall of Wisdom, its purple Gospel and its librarian belong to the Sky Monastery. The libraries of Barlaam and the great monastery, the hidden rooms and the two Gospels are as Curzon tells them. He is the only witness to his own bargain.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapter XIX, pp. 290–291, and chapter XX, pp. 303–309, in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive.

[The next essay Bread and wine › A kitchen that is all chimney, a table in an apse, and a barrel the size of a room.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/table/)

## Every book in the house may be opened and read.

[Walk in to the library ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=library)

---

Robert Curzon came to Meteora in search of manuscripts. He found a library hidden behind a cupboard, bought two Gospels, and had to give them back. And the scriptorium and library of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/books/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/meteora/table/ -->

The sixth essay

# Bread and wine

The brethren eat together twice a day, in a hall built like a church. Everything on the table was grown, baked or pressed within a few minutes' walk of it.

![The cook of the Sky Monastery standing before the great fireplace of the kitchen, dough rising on the table](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-kitchen.webp)

The kitchen of the Sky Monastery, the cook at the great fireplace.

The refectory of a Greek monastery is called the trapeza, the table, and it is the second room of the house after the church. Robert Curzon looked into the one at Barlaam on his way to the net.

> “The refectory is a separate building, with an apsis at the upper end, in which stands a marble table where the sacred bread used by the Greek church is usually placed, and where, I believe, the agoumenos or the bishop dines on great occasions. The walls of this room are also painted: not, however, with the representations of celebrated eaters, but with the likenesses of such thin, famished-looking saints that they seem most inappropriate as ornaments to a dining-room.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XIX

On Athos, Athelstan Riley counted the furniture of the old refectory at Vatopedi: marble tables of all shapes and sizes with rude stone seats, twelve down each side of the hall and one at the end for the presidents.

![The Great Hall of the Sky Monastery cut open from above: long tables, a curved table in the apse, a great fireplace and painted walls](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-refectory-cut.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The Great Hall

The refectory of 1562, opened by a great arch to the older hall. The abbot presides at the table in the apse under the Mystical Supper.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=refectory)

The Sky Monastery's refectory shows two ages. The Old Hall is of the twelfth century, low and narrow under a painted barrel vault dimmed by lamp smoke. The Great Hall was added in 1562 and joined to it by a great arch, and at its east end is an apse, as at Barlaam, where the abbot's curved table stands on a marble dais. The house sits down to Trapeza at noon and to Supper in the evening.

## All chimney and fireplace

At the great monastery of Meteora it was the kitchen that stopped Curzon. It was a very ancient building, he wrote, perched on the extreme edge of the precipice, square, with a steep roof of stone open at the top. Inside, four columns stood on a square platform of stone, and the platform was the hearth.

> “…so that in fact the building was all chimney and fireplace; and when a great dinner was prepared on a feast-day the principal difficulty must have been to have prevented the cook from being roasted among the other meats. The whole of the arched roof was thickly covered with lumps of soot, the accumulations probably of centuries.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XX

The kitchen of the Sky Monastery is of the same family: a square stone hall under an eight-sided drum and a tiled dome with an open lantern, its floor cut down into the rock. A cauldron swings on an iron crane in the great fireplace, under the icon of St Euphrosynos the Cook, and a door opens straight into the servery of the Old Hall.

![A domed clay oven in a dark kitchen, lit from a small window, a long-handled peel leaning against it](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-oven.webp)

**The oven in the old kitchen of the Great Meteoron.** Photograph by Michael Nicht, 2013, CC BY-SA 4.0.

![The bakehouse of the Sky Monastery: the baker at his trough, loaves on the shelves and a fire in the mouth of the oven](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-bakery.webp)

**The bakehouse of the Sky Monastery.** The baker stamps the altar bread with carved seals before the mouth of the great oven.

![The kitchen of the Sky Monastery cut open from above: the fireplace, the tables and the cook at work](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-kitchen-cut.webp)

**The kitchen,** its floor cut down into the rock.

## Supper with the fingers

The abbot of the great monastery had Curzon to supper. A venerable monk poured water over his hands from a vessel like an antique coffee-pot, and he sat down on a cushion on the floor with the abbot and another officer of the house before a metal tray, set on a wooden stool turned upside down.

> “No meat had entered into the composition of our feast, but it was very savoury nevertheless, and our fingers were soon in the midst of the most tempting dishes, knives and forks being considered as useless superfluities.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XX

At Barlaam the night before he had dined the abbot in the abbot's own room. The old man could eat no meat, and made up for it with other dishes; afterwards they drank from coffee-cups of thin old porcelain, and finished with tea, seaman's biscuit, little cakes from Yanina and a jelly of dried grape juice, until it was time to go to bed.

## The cellar

The grape is the monastery's other harvest. At Varlaam visitors are still shown an enormous wine barrel, built of wood alone. At Vatopedi, Riley was taken to the building that held the great winepress, made of heavy beams and timber, and did the sum for himself:

> “Each of the 220 monks of Vatopedi draws his commons of wine every day; so do their 130 servants… Thus the consumption of wine in the course of the year must be enormous.”
>
> — Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks*, 1887, p. 69

The Sky Monastery presses its own. The winery stands on the vineyard ledge below the summit. The grapes are trodden barefoot in a purple-stained tank, work a week in an oak vat and go under a great screw press, and the casks lie in a cellar cut into the rock. The first of every pressing is set aside for the altar and kept under lock in the church. The rest comes up to the table, on every day that is not a fast.

In the house, at this hour

## The winery

The press room smells of must and old wood. The casks lie in the cellar cut into the rock below.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=winery)
[Or go to the kitchen ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=kitchen)
[Or to the bakehouse ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=bakery)

![The press room of the Sky Monastery's winery: a great wooden screw press, a vat and baskets](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-winery.webp)

![An enormous wooden wine barrel in a stone cellar, bound with wooden hoops, a small door in its end](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-barrel.webp)

**The great barrel at Varlaam,** built entirely of wood, without iron hoops. Photograph by Falk2, CC BY-SA 4.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

**What is invented.** The two halls, the domed kitchen, the bakehouse and the winery belong to the Sky Monastery, with their dates. The refectory at Barlaam, the kitchen and the supper at the great monastery are Curzon's; the tables and the wine of Vatopedi are Riley's.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapter XIX, pp. 285–286 and 291–292, and chapter XX, pp. 300–301 and 305; Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks* (London, 1887), pp. 65 and 69. Both in public-domain scans at the Internet Archive. The barrel at Varlaam is from its photograph and the photographer's note.

[The next essay The hermits › Before the monasteries there were men in the caves, and one of them is still there.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hermits/)

## Trapeza is at noon, and Supper in the evening.

[Walk in to the Great Hall ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=refectory)

---

How a monastery on a rock eats: a kitchen that is all chimney and fireplace, a table in an apse, supper with the fingers, and a barrel the size of a room. Curzon at Meteora, Riley on Athos, and the refectory of the Sky Monastery, where you can stand now.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/table/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hermits/ -->

The seventh essay

# The hermits

The monasteries were not the beginning. Long before a wall was raised on any summit, men were living alone in holes in the rock below.

![A small stone house of several storeys built into the mouth of a cave high in a dark cliff, trees below it](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-bandovas.webp)

A hermitage built into a cave of the Bandovas rock at Meteora. Photograph by Falk2, CC BY-SA 4.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The rocks of Meteora are full of holes. Some are the work of water and weather, and many more were cut or widened by hand. Monks are recorded in the caverns as early as the eleventh century, some three hundred years before the first of the great houses was founded on a summit. Robert Curzon rode in across the plain and saw the caves before he saw a monastery.

> “At the foot of many of the rocks which surround this beautiful grassy amphitheatre, there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism whole flocks of hermits roosted in these pigeon-holes. Some of these caves are so high up the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them.”
>
> — Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant*, 1849, chapter XIX

![The old hermits' house of the Sky Monastery cut open: one whitewashed cell with a hearth, and a walled yard on the grass of the ledge](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-hermits.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The old hermits' house

One low limewashed cell with a walled yard at the west end of the ledge, where Father Onouphrios keeps the hours alone. He keeps silence; the yard is as near as guests come.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=hermits)

## Peace be with their memory

Curzon was a man of his century and his church, and the hermits baffled him. He could not see, he wrote, by what reasoning they had persuaded themselves that they were leading holy lives. He set down what the old pictures showed of them: gowns of coarse matting, long beards, chains and iron girdles on wasted bodies.

> “They wore out the rocks with their knees in prayer; the cliffs resounded with their groans; sometimes they banged their breasts with a big stone, for a change.”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XIX

And then, in the same paragraph, he turns round.

> “Still there is something grand in the strength and constancy of their faith. They left their homes and riches and the pleasures of this world, to retire to these dens and caves of the earth, to be subjected to cold and hunger, pain and death, that they might do honour to their God, after their own fashion… and therefore peace be with their memory!”
>
> — Curzon, chapter XIX

From the caves the hermits went up. On the tops of the rocks, he goes on, there remained in his day seven monasteries out of twenty-four which once crowned their heights.

![A steep slope of grey pebbled rock at Meteora with dark cave mouths high in its face, hills in the distance](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-caves.webp)

**Abandoned cave dwellings of the hermits of Meteora.** Photograph by Levin Schilling, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0.

![Engraving of a monastery perched on a cliff at Meteora, a wild goat on the slope below](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-wordsworth-cliffs.webp)

**Cliffs at Meteora.** Christopher Wordsworth, *Greece*, edition of 1882.

![The door of the hermit's cell in the Sky Monastery, the hermit in black seen within, an icon over the lintel](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-hermit-door.webp)

**The door of the cell.** Father Onouphrios within.

## The one who stayed below

The Sky Monastery remembers the same beginning. On the vineyard ledge, below the church and the bell tower, stands the oldest dwelling of the house: the little place where the first hermits lived before anything was built on the summit. The council asked for it to be restored as they had it, with one cell, a hearth and an icon corner. A walled yard lies before it, with a niche in the wall for bread.

A hermit lives there now. Father Onouphrios keeps the hours of the house's day alone, and he does not speak. He is not forgotten. The porter carries bread down to the niche every second day, and the spiritual father of the house goes down to visit him every seventh.

The way to him is the hermits' path: flags laid in the grass across the ledge, past cypresses, olives and almonds, with lanterns for the dark and a wayside shrine of St John the Forerunner where it forks. In the face of the rock above are older places still, among them a cave that bears the name of St Athanasios.

In the house, at this hour

## The hermits' path

The old way of the hermits across the ledge, to a wayside shrine of St John the Forerunner where it forks.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=hermits-path)

![The hermits' path in the Sky Monastery: stepping stones through grass and flowers to a small shrine, a lantern beside it](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-path.webp)

**What is invented.** The old hermits' house, Father Onouphrios, the bread in the niche and the hermits' path belong to the Sky Monastery. The caves of Meteora and the men who lived in them are real, and Curzon's opinions of them are his own.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapter XIX, pp. 279–281, in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive. That monks lived in the caverns as early as the eleventh century is from the article on Meteora at Wikipedia, and wants a better source.

[The next essay The year › A feast kept on a mountain top, the fasts, the vintage and the snow.](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/year/)

## Go down the stair to the ledge. He will not speak, and you need not.

[Walk in to the hermits' house ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=hermits)

---

Before there were monasteries on the rocks of Meteora there were hermits in their caves. Robert Curzon's account of 1849, and the old hermits' house of the Sky Monastery, where one brother still keeps the hours alone.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/hermits/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/meteora/year/ -->

The eighth essay

# The year

Every monastery has one day that is its own. The rest of the year leans toward it: the fasts before, the harvest after, and the long quiet of the winter.

![The vineyard of the Sky Monastery at the vintage: rows of vines heavy with leaf either side of a pergola walk, hives along the parapet](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-vintage.webp)

The vineyard of the Sky Monastery at the vintage.

The great church of the Sky Monastery is dedicated to the Transfiguration, and so is the katholikon of the Great Meteoron. The feast is kept on the sixth of August. It remembers the day Christ went up a mountain with three of his disciples and was seen by them in light, and of all the feasts of the year it is the one that belongs to high places.

On Mount Athos it is kept on the very summit. Athelstan Riley had timed his whole journey from England to be there for it, and at the monastery of Philotheou he learned that he had the day wrong.

> “…we heard, to our dismay, that this was the very night when the monks of Athos celebrate the liturgy on the top of the Holy Mountain in the little chapel of the Transfiguration. The Feast of the Transfiguration is kept on the same day as in our own Church, i.e. on August 6.”
>
> — Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks*, 1887, pp. 148–149

He had miscalculated, he says, partly through carelessness and partly through the difference between the old and the new styles of the calendar. He ordered the mules at once. When at last he climbed the white marble peak, he found the chapel of the Transfiguration on its top, without windows and roofed with a dome of loose stones.

> “We found ourselves in a cloud, and it being very chilly we took refuge in the little Chapel of the Transfiguration, lighted the lamps of the iconostasis (with great difficulty, for the wicks, like everything else in the chapel, were as wet as they could be), and sang *Magnificat*.”
>
> — Riley, p. 213

![The vineyard of the Sky Monastery from above: rows of vines either side of the vine walk](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-vineyard.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The vineyard

Six rows either side of the vine walk, from the shrine of St Tryphon, the vinedressers' saint, at the gate to a stone bench on the rim, with the painted hives along the parapet.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=vineyard)

## The first grapes

The Sky Monastery's year is short. It has twenty-eight days, four weeks of seven, and each week stands for a quarter of the Church's year, so that every feast still falls in its own season. The Transfiguration is the sixth day. At its vigil the first grapes of the year are cut and blessed in the church, and from that day the vintage is open.

The brothers of the fields then go from the rows to the press and from the press to the cellar as the days pass. The grapes are picked and trodden; the must is pressed into the casks; the new wine is racked off in the cellar under the rock while the rows are dug and manured. On the twentieth day, the feast of St Tryphon, the first cuts of the pruning are blessed among the vines, and the prunings are bundled for the hearths. Then the tending begins again.

![The Sky Monastery in high summer, green on the rock](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-summer.webp)

**High summer.** The Transfiguration, and the vintage opened.

![The Sky Monastery in autumn, the trees turned gold and russet](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-autumn.webp)

**Autumn.** The pressing and the new wine; the Nativity fast begun.

![The Sky Monastery in winter, snow on every roof and dome](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-winter.webp)

**Winter.** The Nativity and the Theophany; the vines pruned under snow.

![The Sky Monastery in spring, fresh green and blossom](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-spring.webp)

**Spring.** Great Lent, Pascha, and the garden sown.

## The fast

The other half of the year's rhythm is what is left off the table. The travellers met it at every monastery door. At Barlaam, Robert Curzon asked the abbot to dinner and found that the old man could eat no meat. At the great monastery the next night the abbot's own supper had none in it either, though Curzon thought it very savoury nevertheless.

In the Sky Monastery every Wednesday and Friday is a fast, and so are the days before the great feasts: the Apostles' fast, the Dormition fast, the Nativity fast and Great Lent. On those days no wine is drunk at table. A feast lifts the fast of the day it falls on, and in Great Lent the Annunciation alone does so. The house's steward keeps the reckoning, and on the days between the fasts a cask comes up from the cellar.

## The garden's year

The kitchen garden keeps the same calendar on its own terrace, eleven metres below the summit on the sunny side of the rock. Brother Phokas sows in spring, plants out as the summer comes, and brings greens and beans to the kitchen every day of the garden's plenty. The pears, apples, quinces and pomegranates are picked in the autumn, and the beds are dug and the fruit trees pruned in the snow. Twice a year, on the fourth day and the twenty-sixth, the comb is taken from the hives along the vineyard's parapet: honey for the table, and wax for the chandler's candles.

The whole year, day by day, with today marked on it, is in [the calendar, the clock and the seasons](https://skymonastery.com/calendar/).

![The vineyard in winter: bare vines and trellises under snow](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-pruning.webp)

**The pruning.** The same rows in winter, bare under snow.

![The kitchen garden of the Sky Monastery: bean canes, raised beds of greens and a round basin, the cliff rising behind](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-kgarden.webp)

**The kitchen garden,** four quarters round a basin.

![The garden terrace in spring from above: beds in fresh green, blossom on the trees, the garden shed](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-garden-spring.webp)

**The garden terrace in spring,** the fruit trees in blossom.

In the house, at this hour

## The kitchen garden

Four quarters round a round basin, with pears and apricots on the warm wall, an orchard at the west end, and the shrine of St Phokas the gardener at the tip over the cloud sea.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=kgarden)
[Or go to the winery ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=winery)

![The garden terrace of the Sky Monastery from above: the potager, the orchard and the shed on a shelf of the cliff](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-kgarden-cut.webp)

**What is invented.** The year of twenty-eight days, its vintage, its fasts as the house keeps them, the vineyard, the garden and their brethren belong to the Sky Monastery. The feasts and fasts themselves are the Orthodox Church's. The night on Athos is Riley's, and the abbots' tables are Curzon's.

**Where this comes from.** Athelstan Riley, *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks* (London, 1887), pp. 148–149 and 212–213; Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapters XIX and XX, pp. 285 and 301. Both in public-domain scans at the Internet Archive.

[And then The calendar, the clock and the seasons › Today's hours, the twenty-eight days, and what the rock looks like in each season.](https://skymonastery.com/calendar/)

## Whatever the season is today, the vines are showing it.

[Walk in to the vineyard ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=vineyard)

---

A monastery's year turns on its feast. Athelstan Riley climbing Athos for the Transfiguration in 1883, the fasts at the abbots' tables of Meteora, and the vineyard of the Sky Monastery through its four seasons.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/meteora/year/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/calendar/ -->

How time is kept in the house

# The calendar, the clock and the seasons

The house never stops. A day there passes in one hour of yours, and a whole year, with its fasts, its feasts and its snow, in about a day.

![The bell tower of the Sky Monastery with the great dial on its north face](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-clock.webp)

The great dial on the bell tower's north face.

## The hour now

**—** The hour is read from the house itself when it answers.

The house keeps one clock for everyone. Whoever walks in finds the same hour, the same brethren at the same work, and the same weather. It cannot be paused or hurried.

## The clock

One day of the house is one hour of the world's. Its twenty-four hours run evenly, two and a half minutes each, so the noon meal is never more than an hour away.

The brethren sleep from nine at night until five. Once every brother is in his cell and still, the night passes twelve times faster, and it slows to its proper pace again when the first of them must rise. A guest who walks in during the night finds the lamps lit, the gate barred behind him, and not long to wait for the semantron that calls the house to Orthros.

The house's own clock stands halfway up the bell tower, in the chandler's ringing chamber. Weights of field stone drive its wheels, a verge and foliot keep its beat, and it strikes every hour on its little bell. The chandler winds it each morning on the orders of the Church Book. If nobody winds it, it runs down and stops, and the dial on the tower's north face stops with it.

![The bell tower and its great dial seen from the north square](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-clock.webp)

In the house, at this hour

## The house clock

Stand at the hour stone in the north square, where the dial is read, and set your own watch against it.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=clock)

## The day

The day is hung on the hours of prayer, with the council, the two meals and the work of each office between them. These are the hours the founders gave the house for its first morning. The council may move an hour, and does: when the house answers, the list below is today's, as the Rule now stands.

- 05:30 Orthros *to 07:30*
- 07:30 Liturgy *to 08:36*
- 11:00 Synaxis *to 11:45*
- 12:00 Trapeza *to 12:36*
- 17:30 Vespers *to 18:18*
- 18:30 Supper *to 19:06*
- 20:20 Compline *to 20:56*
- 21:00 Night *to 05:00*

Orthros and the Liturgy are sung in the katholikon, and Vespers and Compline close the day there. The Synaxis is the council of the house, which sits in the synodikon and decides what changes. Trapeza is the noon meal and Supper the evening one, both in the Great Hall, where the abbot presides from the table in the apse. The bells and the iron semantron call each hour a little before it begins.

## The year

The house keeps a short year of twenty-eight days: four weeks of seven, the first day a Monday. Each week is a quarter of the church year, so a day of the house stands for about a fortnight of the world's calendar, and the great feasts fall where the Church keeps them. When the twenty-eighth day is kept the year turns and the first comes round again.

**High summer**

- **1** the Apostles' fast
- **2**
- **3** fast
- **4**
- **5** the Dormition fast
- **6** The Transfiguration
- **7** The Dormition

**Autumn**

- **8** The Church New Year
- **9** The Elevation of the Cross
- **10** fast
- **11**
- **12** fast
- **13**
- **14** the Nativity fast

**Winter**

- **15** the Nativity fast
- **16** the Nativity fast
- **17** The Nativity
- **18** The Theophany
- **19** fast
- **20** St Tryphon
- **21** Great Lent

**Spring**

- **22** Great Lent
- **23** Great Lent
- **24** The Annunciation
- **25** Pascha
- **26** fast
- **27**
- **28** Pentecost

**A feast** is named in its day. *fast*: no wine is drunk at table. The day outlined in gold is today in the house.

## Fasts, feasts and the table

Every Wednesday and Friday is a fast, and so are the days before the great feasts: the Apostles' fast, the Dormition fast, the Nativity fast and Great Lent. On a fast day the house keeps the fast at table and no wine is drunk. On the other days wine is carried up from the cellar under the rock. A feast breaks the fast of the day it falls on: the Nativity falls on a Wednesday and is kept as a feast, and in Great Lent the Annunciation alone lifts the fast for a day.

The church day begins at Vespers, so a feast is first kept on the evening before it. The Transfiguration is the house's own feast, for its church is dedicated to it. At its vigil the first grapes are blessed, and the vintage opens.

## The seasons of the work

The vineyard and the kitchen garden keep the same year, and the brethren's work follows it.

| Days | In the vineyard | In the kitchen garden |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1–5 | **Tending.** The rows hoed, the canes tied, the leaves thinned, the hives tended. | **Planting out.** Seedlings set in the beds, the bean canes put up. |
| 6–9 | **The vintage.** The grapes picked, carried to the winery and trodden in the vats. | **The garden's plenty.** Greens and beans every day, the first apricots and figs. |
| 10–11 | **Pressing.** The must pressed into the casks; the first of every pressing set aside for the altar. | **The garden's plenty.** Greens and beans every day, the first apricots and figs. |
| 12–16 | **The new wine.** The wine settles and is racked in the cellar; the rows are dug and manured. | **The fruit harvest.** Pears, apples, quinces and pomegranates picked; onions and garlic plaited for the cool room. |
| 17 | **The new wine.** The wine settles and is racked in the cellar; the rows are dug and manured. | **Winter digging.** The beds dug, the compost spread, the fruit trees pruned. |
| 18–22 | **Pruning.** The vines cut back to their spurs, the prunings bundled for the hearths. | **Winter digging.** The beds dug, the compost spread, the fruit trees pruned. |
| 23–28 | **Tending** again, to the next summer. | **Sowing.** Beans, chard, lettuce and onion sets sown, and seed started in the garden shed. |

The honey is taken from the hives along the parapet on days 4 and 26: honey for the table, and wax for the chandler's candles.

## What the year looks like

The whole rock shows the season. The broadleaves turn and fall, snow lies on the roofs and the domes, and the almonds blossom. The moon keeps the same twenty-eight days: dark in the pressing, on the tenth day, and full on the eve of Pascha. It rises later each night, so some nights have only stars. Each day has its own weather, the same for every guest.

![The Sky Monastery in high summer, green on the rock](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-summer.webp)

**High summer, days 1–7**Full green, the grass drying to straw, the sun at its highest and the skies mostly clear.

![The Sky Monastery in autumn, the trees turned gold and russet](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-autumn.webp)

**Autumn, days 8–14**The trees turn gold and russet, each in its own time, and from the tenth day their leaves fall on the air.

![The Sky Monastery in winter, snow on every roof and dome](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-winter.webp)

**Winter, days 15–21**Bare crowns and snow on roofs, domes and rock; a low sun and long shadows.

![The Sky Monastery in spring, fresh green and blossom](https://skymonastery.com/site/season-spring.webp)

**Spring, days 22–28**Fresh green, the almonds and the fruit trees in blossom, flowers in the grass and petals on the air.

In the house, at this hour

## The vineyard

Six rows either side of the vine walk, from the shrine of St Tryphon to a stone bench on the rim. The vines show the season.

[Stand there now ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=vineyard)

![The vineyard rows either side of the vine walk](https://skymonastery.com/site/house-vineyard.webp)

## Whatever the hour, the gate is open to guests.

[Walk in ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)

---

How time is kept in the Sky Monastery: a day in an hour, a year of twenty-eight days, the hours of prayer and table, the fasts and feasts, and the four seasons on the rock.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/calendar/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/monasteries/ -->

Meteora in Thessaly

# The six houses

Twenty-four monasteries once stood on the rocks. Six stand today. One traveller saw or tried the door of every one of them in two days.

![Coloured lithograph of the rocks of Meteora rising over the plain](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-stackelberg.webp)

The rocks of Meteora over the plain. Lithograph after O. M. von Stackelberg, 19th century.

Meteora means the things hung in the air. The rocks stand at the edge of the plain of Thessaly, above the town of Kalabaka, and by the end of the fifteenth century there were twenty-four monasteries on their tops. Robert Curzon, who came in the days of the nets, counted seven still kept. Six remain now, and since 1988 they have been on the World Heritage List.

They are living houses of prayer. What follows is not a guide to visiting them, for which each house's own word is the only one to trust. It is what Curzon found at each door, set beside the corner of the Sky Monastery that remembers it.

![Engraving of the great monastery of Meteora on its broad rock, seen across the pillars](https://skymonastery.com/site/plate-curzon-great.webp)

The Transfiguration of the Saviour

## The Great Meteoron

The oldest and the largest, founded by Athanasios the Meteorite in the middle of the fourteenth century. Curzon was drawn up twenty-five fathoms in the net and unpacked before the whole community. He thought it in better order than the others, with about twenty monks in a house built for three times as many, a church more brilliant with gold than Barlaam's, a library hidden behind a cupboard, and a kitchen that was all chimney.

In the Sky Monastery: the katholikon bears the same dedication.

[Stand in the church ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=katholikon)
[Read the church ›](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/church/)

All Saints

## Varlaam

Curzon's Barlaam, within sight of the Great Meteoron. Here he watched his servants go up thirty-seven fathoms in the net, climbed the ladders himself, and dined the old abbot on sherry and sweets. He found fourteen monks on an acre and a half of summit, with the church, a chapel, the refectory, the kitchen and the tower of the windlass round one paved court.

In the Sky Monastery: the winch tower and its net.

[Stand at the windlass ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=stores)
[Read the ascent ›](https://skymonastery.com/meteora/ascent/)

![The monastery of Varlaam on its rock, red roofs above a sheer cliff, wooded hills behind](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-varlaam.webp)

Varlaam. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, 2011, CC BY-SA 4.0.

![An old photograph of the monastery of St Stephen on a broad rock, joined to the hillside behind it](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-stephen.webp)

Hagios Stephanos

## St Stephen

The one house that needed no net. Its rock is cut off from the mountain by a chasm only twelve feet wide where Curzon crossed it, by a wooden drawbridge. Inside he admired a screen of icons carved with foliage, birds and flowers “in the most delicate manner”, was shown a library behind a second cupboard door, and looked out over Kalabaka and the plain to the snow of Mount Olympus.

In the Sky Monastery: the lookout bastion and its cross.

[Stand at the lookout ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=lookout)

The monastery of St Stephen, about 1890. Public domain.

Agia Triada

## The Holy Trinity

A single tall pillar with the monastery on its crown. Ten or twelve monks pulled Curzon up to their door with a rope thirty-two fathoms long. He found a place like a small village, its houses huddled round a little painted church, a hundred musty books and no manuscripts, paid his respects to the bearded saints on the chapel walls, and was let down again.

In the Sky Monastery: the walkway cut along the cliff.

[Stand on the cliff walk ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=cliff-walk)

![The monastery of the Holy Trinity on the flat top of a tall pillar of rock, mountains behind](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-trinity.webp)

The Holy Trinity. Photograph by Dido3, 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0.

![The monastery of Roussanou covering the whole top of a low rock among autumn woods](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-roussanou.webp)

Curzon's Hagia Roserea

## Roussanou

A rock so small, Curzon wrote, that the buildings cover the whole of its summit and leave no room for a garden. The monks were out. Two old women came onto a wooden balcony overhead, declined the honour of his visit, and would not let down the rope ladder, which hung drawn half way up. He tried compliments and then insults, and walked off in high indignation. It is a house of nuns today.

In the Sky Monastery: there is room for a garden square, with a fountain in it.

[Stand in the garden square ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=garden)

Roussanou. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, 2011, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Very likely Curzon's Hagios Nicholas

## St Nicholas Anapafsas

Curzon never climbed to it. From St Stephen he saw the village of Kalabaka lying black below, lately burned and sacked by robbers, and was told that what remained of its people had taken refuge in two monasteries the monks had left some time before, Hagios Nicholas among them. They were in such alarm that they would admit no stranger. A monastery on a rock was, before anything else, a place that could not be taken.

In the Sky Monastery: the great gate is barred each night.

[Stand at the gate ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/?place=gate)

![The small monastery of St Nicholas Anapafsas built up in storeys on a narrow rock, among great grey cliffs](https://skymonastery.com/site/photo-nicholas.webp)

St Nicholas Anapafsas. Photograph by Takeaway, CC BY-SA 3.0.

**What is invented.** Only the Sky Monastery. The six houses are real, and the days described are Curzon's own; his spellings are given beside the names used now.

**Where this comes from.** Robert Curzon, *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London, 1849), chapters XIX and XX, pp. 279–309, in the public-domain scan at the Internet Archive. The count of twenty-four monasteries, the founding of the Great Meteoron, the World Heritage listing of 1988 and Roussanou's present use as a convent are from the articles on Meteora and its monasteries at Wikipedia [these, and the present state of each house, want a better source].

## A seventh house stands on a rock of its own, above the cloud.

[Walk in ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)

---

The six monasteries that still stand on the rocks of Meteora, as Robert Curzon found each of them in 1849: the Great Meteoron, Varlaam, St Stephen, the Holy Trinity, Roussanou and St Nicholas. With the places in the Sky Monastery that answer to them.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/monasteries/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/


<!-- https://skymonastery.com/sources/ -->

About this site

# Sources and credits

## What the Sky Monastery is

The Sky Monastery is an imagined Orthodox monastery on a pillar of rock above a sea of cloud. It can be walked through in a web browser, on a phone or a computer, with nothing to install and no account. It runs on one clock for everyone: a day of the house passes in one hour, its brethren keep the hours of prayer, cook, copy books and tend the vines whether or not anyone is watching, and a guest who walks in finds them wherever they are at that moment.

It was built looking closely at the monasteries of Meteora in Thessaly, and the essays on this site set places in the house beside the real places and customs they answer to.

## What is invented

The Sky Monastery, its Broad Rock, its buildings, its brethren, their names, their books and its year of twenty-eight days are fiction. Nothing on this site speaks for the monasteries of Meteora or of Mount Athos, which are living communities. Each essay ends with a note of what in it is invented and what is taken from a source, and a claim that still wants a better source is marked in the text.

## The books

The essays quote two travellers at length. Both books are in the public domain and can be read whole at the Internet Archive.

- **Robert Curzon,** *Visits to Monasteries in the Levant* (London: John Murray, 1849). Chapters XIX and XX are his two days at Meteora. [Read it at the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/visitstomonaster00curz).
- **Athelstan Riley,** *Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks* (London: Longmans, Green, 1887), an account of his journey to Mount Athos in 1883. [Read it at the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/athosormountaino00rile).

A few background facts (the founding of the Great Meteoron, the count of monasteries, the cutting of the steps in the 1920s, the World Heritage listing) are taken from the articles on [Meteora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteora) and its monasteries at Wikipedia. The essays that use them say so.

## The pictures

Views of the Sky Monastery are taken from the house itself. Every other picture comes from Wikimedia Commons and is listed here with its maker and its licence. Pictures under a Creative Commons licence are shown resized, and cropped by the page to fit; they are otherwise unaltered.

| Picture | By | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Monastery of Barlaam, on one of the rocks of Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monastery_of_Barlaam%2C_on_one_of_the_rocks_of_Meteora_-_Hughes_Thomas_Smart_-_1820.jpg) | T. S. Hughes, 1820 | Public domain |
| [Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meteora%2C_lithograph_by_Louis_Dupr%C3%A9_-_1827.jpg) | Louis Dupré, lithograph, 1827 | Public domain |
| [View of Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_Meteora%2C_lithograph_from_edition_by_O_M_Von_Stackelberg.jpg) | After O. M. von Stackelberg, 19th century | Public domain |
| [View of the monastery of St Barlaam, at Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_the_monastery_of_St_Barlaam%2C_at_Meteora_-_Curzon_Robert_-_1849.jpg) | Robert Curzon, 1849 | Public domain |
| [The Great Monastery of Meteora, from the monastery of Barlaam](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_the_Great_Monastery_of_Meteora%2C_from_the_Monastery_of_Barlaam%2C_with_river_Peneus_in_the_distance_-_Curzon_Robert_-_1849.jpg) | Robert Curzon, 1849, from a drawing by Viscount Eastnor | Public domain |
| [Plan of the church at Barlaam](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_of_the_chapel_at_Varlaam_Monastery%2C_Meteora_-_Curzon_Robert_-_1849.jpg) | Robert Curzon, 1849 | Public domain |
| [Cliffs at Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cliffs_at_Meteora_-_Wordsworth_Christopher_-_1882.jpg) | Christopher Wordsworth, Greece, edition of 1882 | Public domain |
| [General view of Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:General_view_of_Meteora_-_Wordsworth_Christopher_-_1882.jpg) | Christopher Wordsworth, Greece, edition of 1882 | Public domain |
| [Monastery of Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monastery_of_Meteora_-_Wordsworth_Christopher_-_1882.jpg) | Christopher Wordsworth, Greece, edition of 1882 | Public domain |
| [The Transfiguration, wall painting at Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fresco_of_the_Transfiguration_-_Holy_Transfiguration%2C_Meteora.jpg) | Unknown painter | Public domain |
| [Wall painting in the monastery of the Great Meteoron](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_paintings_in_the_Monastery_of_Great_Meteoron_02.jpg) | Unknown Cretan painter | Public domain |
| [The vaults and the dome at Varlaam](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Megala_Meteora_12.jpg) | Nanosanchez, 2009 | Public domain |
| [Lines of the Codex Ebnerianus](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Ebnerianus_Prolog_J_1%2C_5b-10.JPG) | Facsimile of 1856 | Public domain |
| [The monastery of St Stephen, about 1890](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meteora%2C_Monastery_of_Agios_Stefanos%2C_ca_1890.jpg) | Unknown photographer | Public domain |
| [The skulls of the fathers at Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meteora_Skulls_-_panoramio.jpg) | P. León, 2008 | [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) |
| [A monk playing a semantron](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monk_playing_a_semantron.jpg) | Rklawton, 2005 | [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) |
| [The oven in the old kitchen of the Great Meteoron](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wood-fired_oven_in_the_Old_Kitchen_%28cook_house%29.jpg) | Michael Nicht, 2013 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [The great barrel at Varlaam](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J26_607_Vala%C3%A1m%2C_Weinfass.jpg) | Falk2 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [A hermitage in a cave of the Bandovas rock](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J26_541_%C3%81gios_Nik%C3%B3laos_B%C3%A1ndovas.jpg) | Falk2, 2016 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [Abandoned cave dwellings of the hermits of Meteora](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Verlassene_H%C3%B6hlenwohnungen_in_Meteora.jpg) | Levin Schilling, 2017 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [Varlaam](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Varlaam_Monastery%2C_Meteora.jpg) | Bernard Gagnon, 2011 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [The Holy Trinity](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meteora_Agios_Triadas_IMG_7632.jpg) | Dido3, 2007 | [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) |
| [Roussanou](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roussanou_Monastery%2C_Meteora.jpg) | Bernard Gagnon, 2011 | [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) |
| [St Nicholas Anapafsas](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agios_Nikolaos_Anapafsa.jpg) | Takeaway | [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) |

## For readers that are not people

Every page of this site is also served as plain Markdown: add `index.md` to a page's address, or ask for it with `Accept: text/markdown`. A list of the pages is at [/llms.txt](https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt), the whole site in one file at [/llms-full.txt](https://skymonastery.com/llms-full.txt), and what is happening in the house at this moment at [/now.md](https://skymonastery.com/now.md).

## The gate is open. The porter keeps water and bread at his window.

[Walk in ›](https://skymonastery.com/walk/)

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What the Sky Monastery is, what is invented in it, the travellers' books its essays are drawn from, and the credit and licence of every picture.

This page: https://skymonastery.com/sources/ · All pages: https://skymonastery.com/llms.txt · Walk into the Sky Monastery: https://skymonastery.com/walk/