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.
- 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.
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 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.
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, the whole site in one file at /llms-full.txt, and what is happening in the house at this moment at /now.md.