"Hike to St Nikola at Lake Matka (part 1)" Top 5 Page for this destination Matka Travelogue by Pijlmans

Matka Travel Guide: 32 reviews and 147 photos

The Monastery and church of St Nikola can only be reached by foot, there are two ways to get there:

1) Starting at the blue bridge at the beginning of the Matka canyon
2) Starting from the Monastery of St Andrea (St Andrew)

If you choose option 2, you have to ask somebody at the Monastery of St Andrea to bring you by boat to the other site of the lake. This is the steep way up. Option 1 is less steep. You can combine the two as well, in that case I suggest you take option 2 uphill and route 1 downhill: If you take route 2 downhill from St Nikola, and there is nobody with a boat on the other side of the lake at the Monastery of St Andrea to come and get you (just shout), you have to climb back up and go downhill via route 1 anyway.

We walked uphill via route 1, and downhill via the same way again, which of course also is an option!

See the map of Lake Matka for an overview of the sites.

How to get to Matka

Start of the hike

You can get to Lake Matka with e.g. suburban bus 60 or bus 2, see here for more information. Bus 60 will take you close to the start of route 1, the blue bridge.

We decided to take another bus and to add some kilometers to the hike by walking along river Treska. We took bus 12 to its final stop (Ezero Treska, make sure you have the right bus, we once took a numer 12 that went somewhere else, probably from a private bus company).

The last stop seems to be in the middle of nowhere, near a small rubbish dump. From there you take the path shown in the picture. Don't worry, scenery will get better soon!

Church

If you follow the path, you see the river Treska on your right.

Soon you will also see a church up in the hills. You can make a short detour to visit this church. It was closed when we were there.