Castoria + Panaya Sumela + Veria
Description:
I invite you to the author's trip! Kastoria is a cute and romantic town, standing at an altitude of 700 m above sea level, located in the mountains, at a distance of 10 km from the border of Albania.
It's always beautiful! After all, there are fabulous Byzantine houses reflected in the mirror of the city! This is the mirror-Lake Aristiada, one of the most beautiful lakes in Europe. There are many animals in it, in the form of fish and feathered, beautiful swans and ducks, which you can feed, taking with you not much bread. We will visit the ancient temple, 10th century, preserved for us by a miracle, see frescoes that cause joy and peace, light candles and write notes about our loved ones. We will visit the folklore museum, which will tell you about the life of the local residents of Kastoria in the 16th-19th centuries. There is also a stalactite dragon cave, which we will visit if you wish. And in the end, of course, we will tour the whole lake, where you can drink coffee on the embankment if you want, admiring the lake, swans, pelicans and ducks.
*** Then we will climb through a small pass into the mountain, to the village of Castonia, where the world-famous miraculous icon of Panagia Sumelotissa is located, it was written by St. Apostle Luke in Athens, and it was she who indicated in a dream to the Greek monks Barnabas and Sophronius where to build a monastery. In Greece, the icon was kept in the Athens Historical Museum for more than thirty years and only many years later was transferred to the new church “Panagia Sumela”, built in 1953 with the funds of refugees from Pontus who settled in the mountains of Vermion, in the village of Castagna.
Nowadays thousands of pilgrims from all over the country and from all over the world come here to worship Panagia and ask her for mercy, because it is the Great Panagia! There, near the temple, on the site you can drink deliciously prepared coffee, or have a snack of fresh cooked meat on the grill if you are hungry.
In an hour we shall descend to Veria, which all the Greeks call little Jerusalem. It was there that the Apostle Paul preached, and it is to that place and to those steps that we will go. By then, the evening will come and, feeling pleasantly tired, we will return home.
***** All participants of the tour as a gift ring with 10 knots!