Qalaat Samaan

Our big day trip from Aleppo involved a visit to a place I have been waiting years to see—Qalaat Samaan, or the church of St. Simeon the Stylite. Simeon was once an ordinary monk, but he was just too intense for the other brothers and was politely asked to leave. (He is said to have tied a rope tightly around his body and let it dig into his flesh, which eventually putrefied and made him rather unfit for human company.) After some further antics, Simeon led the last forty or so years of his life on top of a giant column, where he prayed without ceasing. There isn't much left of the column now—in fact, Dan said, "That's not a column, that's a potato." But allegedly this church guards what remains.



The church was also filled with some strange objects, such as helmets, bows and arrows, thrones, and sun-bleached carpets. One of the men working at the church informed us that it was currently being used as the set for an Egyptian movie. He didn't know the title, but one day I hope to see this masterpiece. Dan and I couldn't resist messing around with the props a little...



We also visited some ruins around the area, including Deir Samaan (the monastery paired with Qalaat Samaan, now inhabited by locals) and a couple of dead cities. Syria is basically filled with the ruins of abandoned Byzantine villages, many of whose buildings have been reused by modern inhabitants. One guy had made a lovely house out of an abandoned building with gorgeous carvings. My favorite was probably the church reused as a stable for cows. People are really cool about letting you wander through their homes and are very friendly. It's amazing to just see ruins popping up out of the countryside like unnatural plants, and to be allowed to climb all over them to your heart's content. Of course, if some of those ruins are already filled with cow manure, it is difficult to say how much more damage a tourist could actually do.