St. Stephen Monastery

Kalabaka, Greece

The Monastery of St. Stephen was founded by St. Antoninus Cantacuzene, who is thought to be a son of the Serb ruler Nicephorus II of Epirus, in c. 1400.

This monastery rests on the plain rather than on a cliff. It was shelled by the Nazis during World War II who believed it was harboring insurgents and was abandoned. The monastery was given over to nuns in 1961 and they have reconstructed it into a flourishing nunnery, with 28 nuns in residence in 2015.

The old katholikon (main church), which was rebuilt in 1545 and frescoed shortly thereafter, still stands. The new katholikon was built in 1798 and is currently being frescoed by a modern artist. It is dedicated to the martyred St. Charalambos, whose head it contains.

The refectory (15th century) has a surviving fresco of the Virgin in the apse. The monastery contains a small museum of vestments and other religious objects and the nuns sell handmade embroideries and other trinkets.

Monasteries of Meteora are included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

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Address

Meteora, Kalabaka, Greece
See all sites in Kalabaka

Details

Founded: c. 1400
Category: Religious sites in Greece

More Information

www.visitmeteora.travel
www.sacred-destinations.com

Rating

4.6/5 (based on Google user reviews)

Interesting Sites Nearby


Monastery of Great Meteoron (2,2 km)
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Meteora (1,5 km)
Holy Trinity Monastery (0,5 km)
St. Nikolaos Anapafsas Monastery (2 km)

User Reviews

Rachael Vonada (14 months ago)
This was very beautiful. I recommend taking a tour of all the monasteries at Meteora. It is €3 to go into each one ~6. Dress in long pants and a shirt with short/long sleeves.
Tina Sobol (14 months ago)
Loved our experience!!! all Orthodox Christians should visit this Amazing Monastery. The Sisters were all so kind ❤
Sergey Poleff (15 months ago)
The must. Easy to reach by car. Last 5-10 minutes before closing are the best time to enjoy the tranquility and peacefulness of the place because all tourists groups already leave at this time.
David Tsani (15 months ago)
A must visit once in a lifetime. The view is breathtaking!!
K. Honan (16 months ago)
Bring long trousers and shirt if male, cover your shoulders and use one of their sarong skirts if female. If you’re a guy and wearing shorts the nuns don’t like you trying to use one of the sarong skirts to cover your shorts. It costs around €3 to enter and there is a small museum and a shop which feels a little... strange to have in a holy place. Moneylenders, anyone? The view is nice, but can easily be obtained standing anywhere on the range, the real appeal is seeing inside a monastery that was abandoned by the monks and then taken over by nuns.
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The original Cochem Castle, perched prominently on a hill above the Moselle River, served to collect tolls from passing ships. Modern research dates its origins to around 1100. Before its destruction by the French in 1689, the castle had a long and fascinating history. It changed hands numerous times and, like most castles, also changed its form over the centuries.

In 1151 King Konrad III ended a dispute over who should inherit Cochem Castle by laying siege to it and taking possession of it himself. That same year it became an official Imperial Castle (Reichsburg) subject to imperial authority. In 1282 it was Habsburg King Rudolf’s turn, when he conquered the Reichsburg Cochem and took it over. But just 12 years later, in 1294, the newest owner, King Adolf of Nassau pawned the castle, the town of Cochem and the surrounding region in order to finance his coronation. Adolf’s successor, Albrecht I, was unable to redeem the pledge and was forced to grant the castle to the archbishop in nearby Trier and the Electorate of Trier, which then administered the Reichsburg continuously, except for a brief interruption when Trier’s Archbishop Balduin of Luxembourg had to pawn the castle to a countess. But he got it back a year later.

The Electorate of Trier and its nobility became wealthy and powerful in large part due to the income from Cochem Castle and the rights to shipping tolls on the Moselle. Not until 1419 did the castle and its tolls come under the administration of civil bailiffs (Amtsmänner). While under the control of the bishops and electors in Trier from the 14th to the 16th century, the castle was expanded several times.

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Louis Jacques Ravené (1823-1879) did not live to see the completion of his renovated castle, but it was completed by his son Louis Auguste Ravené (1866-1944). Louis Auguste was only two years old when construction work at the old ruins above Cochem began in 1868, but most of the new castle took shape from 1874 to 1877, based on designs by Berlin architects. After the death of his father in 1879, Louis Auguste supervised the final stages of construction, mostly involving work on the castle’s interior. The castle was finally completed in 1890. Louis Auguste, like his father, a lover of art, filled the castle with an extensive art collection, most of which was lost during the Second World War.

In 1942, during the Nazi years, Ravené was forced to sell the family castle to the Prussian Ministry of Justice, which turned it into a law school run by the Nazi government. Following the end of the war, the castle became the property of the new state of Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate). In 1978 the city of Cochem bought the castle for 664,000 marks.

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