RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES

First Baron Houghton

MEMORIALS OF A TOUR IN GREECE,
CHIEFLY POETICAL

The Rocks of Meteora

The ‘Rocks of Meteora’ are, perhaps, the most marvellous combination of Nature and Art, of the strange humours of geology and humanity, that the world presents. My attention was excited, from some distance, by a group of naked cliffs of unequal heights standing out against the twilight sky, the highest of which seemed pointing to the evening star, that rested glimmering a little way above. But on a close approach in full morning light, through a grove of white mulberry trees that cover a gentle ascent, the feeling of singularity became so intense, that pleasure could not keep itself silent, but burst forth in loud and repeated laughter. The rocks come on, cluster on cluster, splinter and mass, some light and slender enough to be confounded with the cypresses at their sides, others immense, solid, and cathedral: others again in huge globes or formless clumps, so that the general outline is as wildly irregular as well was ever drawn along paper by the half-unconscious hand of an absent man, who lets a pen trail up and down and on at random, while his thoughts are other where. But it is wild-witted manhood that, for purposes of self-defence, or pious seclusion, or both has given fresh peculiarity to this prodigy of Nature. The dwelling-places here constructed are of two kinds: small huts of reeds stand in artificial caves, of an oblong form, scoopt at a fearful height in perpendicular cliffs of sand-stone or pudding-stone, and accessible only by fragile ladders, frailly attacht to one another. The spectator at first is almost incredulous of their reality; he sends his imagination away into distant history, and can find nothing to connect with the scene before him, except the record of the people of Edom, who dwelt ‘in the clefts of the rock’, and held ‘the height of the hill’, and made their ‘nest, as high as the eagle’. But the excavations in the rocks of the city of Idumea (whatever may have been their use in times of danger) seem to have been generally applied to sepulchral objects; and, though perhaps more remarkable as works of human ingenuity, their appearance, at least in their present desolation, can hardly be more astonishing than this. The greater part, however, of the houses are of the common Eastern construction and planted on the tops of isolated rocks, not only covering the whole of the irregular surfaces, but stretching out broad verandas over the unbroken precipice. Of this kind are the two principal monasteries, whose aerial positions are attainable by the simple and rapid mode of elevation in an net, a safe ascent of about four minutes and a half.

Excerpt from:

Richard Monckton Milnes, Memorials of a Tour in Greece, Chiefly Poetical, London 1834