Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Born at Sisan in northern Syria, the son of a shepherd and reportedly under the influence
of his mother, Martha (who also became a saint), he developed a zeal for Christianity and
entered a monastery before the age of 16. However, he was at the extreme end of asceti-
cism and because of the increasingly bizaare nature of the trials he put himself through, he
was asked to leave.
Simeon then performed a series of trials that he believed brought him closer to God. He
shut himself up for three years in a hut, and later took to standing continually upright so
long as his limbs would sustain him. These were followed by compelling himself to remain
a prisoner within a narrow space on a rocky eminence on the slopes of a mountain.
Attracted by his extreme ascetisism, an increasing number of pilgrims sought him out, ask-
ing for his counsel or his prayers. To counter the crowds, he built a small platform on top
of a pillar he had discovered amongst some ruins. He was determined to live out his life on
top of the pillar.
This first pillar was little more than four metres high, but his wellwishers subsequently re-
placed it with others, the last in the series being over 15 metres. At the top of the pillar was
a platform, which is believed to have been about one square metre.
Simeon would not allow any woman to come near his pillar, not even his own mother, re-
portedly telling her:
"If we are worthy, we shall see one another in the life to come."
Remaining in the area, she also embraced the monastic life of silence and prayer.
Edward Gibbon described Simeon's existence:
In this last and lofty station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers, and
the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous
situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of de-
votion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure
of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre
