Simeon was born in the Amanus mountains around 390 and entered monastic life young. It did not work. The problem was not that he was unsuited to austerity — it was that he was too good at it. The communities that took him in could not live with the severity he imposed on himself, and he left, or was asked to leave, more than once.
So he went up. He settled on a column and stayed on it, raising it in stages until it stood about eighteen metres above the ground, and he lived there for roughly the last thirty-seven years of his life.
01What he actually did up there
The image is of a man escaping the world. The record says close to the opposite. He preached twice a day, every day, to crowds who had walked up to hear him. People brought him disputes to settle. The emperors Theodosius and Leo sent to him for advice on affairs of state — which is a remarkable thing to be true of a man living on a pillar in the hills north-west of Aleppo.
He was, in effect, the most accessible holy man of his age precisely because he was physically unreachable. You could not touch him and you could not follow him home. You could only walk up the hill, stand at the base, and listen. That arrangement turned a personal austerity into a public institution, and it is why a road, an arch, a hostel and eventually the largest church in the world were built around him.
02The idea he started
Others followed. Stylites — pillar-dwellers — became a recognised form of ascetic life in Syria and beyond for centuries afterwards, including a second Simeon on another mountain. It is one of the few religious practices of late antiquity that can be traced to a single person and a single hill, and this is that hill.
03The death, and the argument over the body
He died in 459, at about sixty-nine. Antioch and Constantinople both wanted the remains; Antioch got them. The column stayed where it was, and within a couple of decades the emperor Zeno had begun raising a building around it.
04What is left of the column
Not much, and the reason is the site's own success. Pilgrims chipped pieces off it as relics, century after century, until a column of about eighteen metres stood at roughly two. The shrine was eaten by devotion to itself. In 2016 the surviving stump was damaged again, in an airstrike.
It is worth walking into the octagon knowing this. The four ruined basilicas radiate out from a worn block of limestone that people carried away in their pockets. The building is enormous and the thing it was built for is almost gone — and that, more than any single wall, is the story of Qalaat Semaan.