Meteora, Greece | Travel Photography

Greece.  I love this country.  Every visit has been fantastic and there is so much to explore.  I learned about Meteora from a past groom who is a professor of Geogolgy at Boston College.   To put it mildly, he is obsessed with rocks (!!) and had spent some time during his PhD program studying in Greece.  The geological landscape is unique in the world and when he was describing it to me (over a bottle of wine on the gorgeous cliffs of Capri, Italy) I vowed I would go.  Meteora is famed for six monasteries that are built into the shear sandstone cliffs.  You can read more about it here.

Meteora is a bit off the beaten path.  It’s in the middle of the county and not nearby any major cities, at least by European standards.  We decided to make the 7 hour driving trek in a rental car from Sofia, Bulgaria.  What an adventure.  We were ill prepared, not even thinking to have a few Euros on us.  (Which is necessary in rural Greece where ATMs are not a’plenty!)  We were without data on our phones and didn’t even have a map.  We somehow made it to Meteora (signs in Greek are hard to read!) and even more astonishingly stumbled upon our hotel (among what seemed like hundreds!) without having to ask for directions! :)

Meteora was everything I dreamed it would be!  It is the perfect place to hike, explore, have picnics on rock cliffs, drink wine on rock cliffs, enjoy leisurely meals of delicious fresh Greek food, and to just relax.  The monasteries seem to grow out of the cliffs and it is just a spectacular site.

On the way back to Sofia, we stopped for a short visit in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki- a beautiful port city on the Aegean Sea.  It’s a 4 hour drive from Sofia and I’ve visited the city several times before.  We wandered the markets and enjoyed an amazing lunch.  A few photos below were captured there.

Can’t wait to go back to Greece!

{This trip was part of a month long adventure across Bulgaria, Istanbul & Cappadocia, Turkey, and Russia.}