Calimbaca

Calimbaca under the metiora mountains was the next city we stayed in. We arrived at night so that we wouldn't be able to see the mountaintop. In the morning we were astounded to find ourselves surrounded by sharp jagged cliffs. We drove on a narrow path to the top and entered the grand metiora, the largest monastery of the eight the still remain. Today only three monks live there, as the silence is often broken by the many tourists, and the monks are discouraged by the lack of solitude. The monastery is on it's own an engineering ingenuity.built into the mountain it can only be accessed by a cavelike passageway cut through the cliffs. Before the stairs were designed, monks used to be hoisted up to the monastery in a cage of netting- as if one could fish a monk from the fog below. In the monastery there was this room filled with the skulls of past monks who had lived and died in the grand metiora. How strange that the dead far surpass the numbers a of the living there! 

Coincidences are inherently bizarre. What coincidence then that our tour guide,who knew so much about the Greek orthodox church, was also Jewish! after the grand metiora we stopped for lunch and recited mincha for this woman. Her mother had just died, and so we said Kaddish with her. And a woman who had very little connection with her heritage and knew no Hebrew, got to greive for her mother; retracing the same words that her family had probably said generations ago.