Theopetra

At Meteora in the northwestern edge of the Thessaly in central Greece, six Eastern Orthodox monasteries are built on natural sandstone rock pillars and tower over the land. The area was first inhabited by hermetic monks in the 9th Century who found crevices and fissures in the sheer walls to live in, some 1800 feet above the plain. Eventually the monasteries were painstakingly built.

Three miles south are the caves of Theopetra. These caves, close to a river, have sheltered countless people back through history and contain evidence of two great transitions in man's development, the replacement of Neanderthal by modern homo sapiens and the transition from hunter gathering to farming. It was used and inhabited continuously from the Palaeolithic period onwards (50,000 to 5,000 years ago.) The caves contain a wall, built 23,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age to protect the inhabitants from cold winds. It is the oldest man-made structure in Greece and perhaps the world.

The cave is a huge chamber at the foot of a limestone cliff, high up on the hill above the village Theopetra. The entrance portal is very big, 17m wide and three meters high, with a huge chamber behind, almost rectangular with a size of 500m². The cave is reached on a winding road from the village.


The Monasteries of Meteora:

The Caves of Theopetra: