- Built by
- Simeon the Stylite
- Original height
- About 18 m
- Height today
- About 2 m
- Occupied
- c. 422–459
- Damaged
- Earlier attrition; airstrike, 2016
Everything here is arranged around a stone that a man stood on.
Simeon spent roughly the last thirty-seven years of his life on a column, raising it in stages until it stood about eighteen metres above the ground, and preaching twice a day to whoever had walked up to hear him. When he died in 459 the column stayed, and the church was built around it.
It did not stay whole. Pilgrims took it. Over fourteen centuries, chips were broken off as relics until the column stood at roughly two metres — the shrine consumed by devotion to itself, one fragment at a time. In 2016 the surviving stump was damaged again, in an airstrike.
This is the most honest thing on the hill. The building was raised to hold a column, and the column is now the smallest thing in it. Standing at the centre of the octagon, looking at a worn block of limestone with four ruined basilicas radiating away from it, you are looking at the whole history of the place compressed into one object.