Saint Simeon, Aleppo

Saint Simeon, Syria

The story of Saint Simeon inspired me to travel the 25 miles out of Aleppo to visit the site where he lived. A hard core follower of austerity practices, he was asked to leave the monastery where he lived because he refused to eat or drink for several days and was found once bounded by the waist with a girdle made of palm fronds so tight that it took several days of soaking to remove them. After he left the monastery and shut himself for a year in a hut. When he came out of it alive, he was perceived as a saint.

In order to get away from people who sought him for advice and prayers, leaving him little time for his austerities, Saint Simeon perched himself on a four meter high pillar atop a meter long platform. He said that if he was unable to escape the world horizontally, he would do it vertically. From there he gave advice, wrote letters and talked to people in the afternoons. Children in the neighborhood climbed up the pillar to bring him bread and goat milk.

Saint Simeon lived on top of this pillar for 37 years, through harsh summers and winters, and his pillar eventually became as high as 15 meters from the ground.

The ruins I visited is known in Arabic as the Qalaat Semaan, The Fortress of Simeon and it consists of four basilicas built around an octagonal courtyard in the area where Saint Simeon's pillar was located. There was also a baptism building on the site and the views of Syria and Turkey from there were astounding.