St. Symeon Stylites the Younger

Symeon was born at Antioch in 521. He took to the ascetic life extraordinarily early, and the accounts place him on a pillar while still a boy, which is the detail that sets him apart even among the stylites.

He lived near Antioch, on the hill that took the name of the Wonderful Mountain, where a monastery grew up around his pillar. As with the elder Symeon, the pillar drew people rather than sealing him off from them, and he spent his life receiving those who climbed to it.

The sources do not agree on the year of his death. The older reference works give 596 in one place and the twenty-fourth of May, 597, in another, and the calendar note carried in this app reads 596. The day is not in question and his memory is kept on the twenty-fourth of May. The year is left as the sources leave it.

He is called the Younger to distinguish him from Symeon the Stylite, who lived a century before him and whose name and manner of life he took up.