After 2 miles of smiling orchards, at a village with white, pink and blue houses, the road turns sharply into an unearthly forest of gigantic pillars rising to 1,820 feet above sea level. These rock-needles were believed to be meteors hurled by an angry god, though in fact they were split and twisted into their fantastic shape by the erosive power of the sea.
These inaccessible pinnacles offered a safe refuge to pious hermits in the turbulent 14th century, when the Serbian emperors of Trikkala were competing with Byzantium for the fertile valley, retreating before the incursions of soldiers and brigands to their impregnable rocks. Within a few years the monk Athanasius founded the Monastery of the Transfiguration on the Great Meteoron and imposed the austere rules of the Holy Mountain, rigorously excluding women. Other hermitages followed the example and expanded into monasteries, but the Meteoron retained a dominant position, counting among Athanasius' disciples members of the rival imperial houses of Constantinople and Serbia. A scion of the latter, the Hermit-King Joasaph, richly endowed the monastery; but it was the advent of John Cantacuzene, expelled by his joint emperor from the Byzantine throne, that gave the Meteoron imperial prestige. The abbots refused to recognize the overriding authority of the Superior of the Ascetics any longer, but instead sought to secure their own domination. The ensuing bitter struggle was sharpened by the contest for arable soil, and the violation of all the founder's precepts led inevitably to a rapid decline. Only 5 of the 24 imposing monasteries that once rose proudly on the black rocks remain today; even the vestiges of the others have disappeared from the towering summits they crowned.
The expropriation of Church land for the settlement of refugees in the 1920's sealed the fate of the already decaying monasteries, which are at present too poor to serve the visitor the traditional liqueur or coffee. Only Aghios Stephanos extends hospitality, and from the windows of the guest room one enjoys a sublime view over the vast plain to the sea, that can just be discerned on the horizon. North and west rise the formidable barriers of Olympus and Pindus, still snowcovered when the almond and peach trees are in bloom, shading the green corn and the flaming red poppy fields.