Meteora once held roughly two dozen monasteries reachable only by net and rope; six remain active today, reached by steps cut into the rock instead.
Founded by hermits, then formalised
Hermits are recorded living in caves within Meteora's rock pillars from around the eleventh century, and organised monastic communities developed from the fourteenth century onward, with the monk Athanasios the Meteorite credited with founding the Great Meteoron, the largest of the complexes, establishing a more structured monastic rule atop the rocks that individual hermits had occupied more informally before him.
From nets to staircases
Access to the monasteries historically required climbing removable rope ladders or being hauled up in nets, a deliberately precarious system that limited entry and reinforced the monasteries' isolation as a form of ongoing discipline. Steps and bridges cut into the rock during the twentieth century replaced most of this system, making the remaining six active monasteries, out of an original number closer to twenty-four, considerably more accessible to visitors than to the monks who first built them there.
As this entry's companion article covers
The broader idea that the monasteries' extreme inaccessibility functioned as a form of prayer and spiritual discipline in itself, rather than merely as a practical defensive measure, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.