Kalampaka (day 11)

This morning we had another great breakfast and after that we took the car to go see the monasteries at Meteora. The monastery we visited is the one that is the furthest away,but also the nicest one. As I mentioned yesterday, the monasteries are build on top of the peculiar shaped rocks. The monasteries are centuries old, in the old times the monks used to pull themselfs but also their tools up in a net. The pulley is still used to this day for constuction tools (for renovation by example), they only use more modern equipment to hoist.

After seeing the monastery, we went to the village Metsovo on the advice of the hotel owner / -employer. This is quite an authentic village, where old men with a cane gather on the village square to sit down on a bench and discuss the Greek politics with eachother or something like that. This is actually a nice town to enjoy the ambiance. Speaking of enjoying, in this village we enjoyed our lunch in a tavern. After finishing our lunch we went to the next place (or actually a city) called Ioánnina, here we went to the old city (this city still has a fortress wall and a citadel) and the former mosque, which is nowadays a museum. In the Ottoman era the Ottomans destroyed all churches in the city and started building mosques to confirm the successful conquering. It went like this until the liberation in 1913. There used to live about 2.000 jews in the same city about 20 - 30 years later (before the 2nd world war). The nazis deported a lot of jews to concentration camps like Auschwitz. Only a few hundred jews originating from Ioánnina survived the war and emigrated to New York or Israel. After seeing the former mosque we walked a bit to the old citadel. The founder of the mosque that we just visited (Aslan Pasha) used to live here. Right next to the building where he lived with his wife Emine is the tomb where his (decapitated) body is buried. His wife is buried next to him. The building where they used to live got destroyed in a fire somewhere in the 30's. After rebuilding, the nazis used it as their headquarters. At this point the jewish inhabitants of the city had to gather, so they could be transported to the concentration camps. Nowadays this building is a museum. After seeing all this, we drove back to Meteora. We drove by all 5 monasteries (now they were all closed, it was already 17:00 o'clock). We drove by to make some good pictures, with a nice sunlight (for a beautiful effect on the pictures), but also because there are no tourists around who are massively present during the day. After a complete photoshoot with all 5 monasteries we went back to Kalampaka, but not before went to Kastraki again where we had dinner at the same restaurant as yesterday. After a good meal we went back to the hotel for another night's rest. Tomorrow we will be visiting another 1 or 2 monasteries in Meteora and after that we will be heading to already our last destination: Nea Makri. This is a seaside resort at about 30 km away from Athens, here we will be staying for 3 nights (2 days). Also we will go to Marathon, where the famous running race originates from. For the rest we don't have a schedule. On Saturday we are going to drive the last 30 km from Nea Makri towards Athens, where we have to return the rental car and take the airplane back to Amsterdam. I am going to describe tomorrow what we did that day, although it won't be that extanded I think... For now a good night and sleep well. See you tomorrow!

Day 10

Travel overview

Day 12