It turns out that July 11th was the day last year when Cas and I visited Uluru (Ayer's Rock), and today, we saw the monestaries on top of the large stones here in Greece.
A sample:
It looks like the buildings grow out of the top of the rocks. Pretty amazing, and certainly hard to visit. It's probably easy to be devout in your worship when you are so split apart from the rest of the people. We actually went inside a nunnery and an extremely old Byzantine church, but one of the rules in these places was that you are not allowed to take photos inside. Enjoy the garden just outside of the nunnery, as it was the last thing we could photograph before entering:
We went from there to a Byzantine church, Our tour guide was a local guy with a big personality. He was baptized as a child in that very church. The thing I kind of knew in the back of my brain but nearly forgot was how completely gaudy and fancy the Byzantines were. There was so much gold leaf and so much gold-thread embroidery. It was all beautiful in its own way, but not my speed, exactly. I don't even wear that much jewelry, and what I do wear has been chosen for its ability to achieve beauty in its simplicity.
After a lot of marching about and some serious perspiration (it was over 100 degrees here today) we got a treat. We were able to watch the sun set over the rocks. There is a lookout point that is actually pretty crowded, but there was room for us among the tourists and the couples doing their bridal photography.
We have a hike to go on tomorrrow, though Cas and I aren't ruling out the option to skip it and jump in the swimming pool. In the meantime, though, enjoy a susnet:
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