01The project
This site is published under the authority of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums and the Ministry of Tourism.
It is part of Touristech — a JCI Beroea initiative for the digitisation of Syrian heritage — and it was developed by Raizer.
02How it handles what it does not know
Anything marked in a tinted, dashed style is a placeholder: a value we do not yet have. We publish the empty field rather than a plausible guess, because on a site carrying a ministry's name an invented figure that looks like a fact is worse than no figure at all.
Where the record is genuinely unsettled, the page says so instead of choosing the more convenient answer.
03Facts held open
The years on the column
The Directorate-General of Antiquities gives forty-two, deriving it from Theodoret — writing in 444, he records seeing Simeon on the column for the twenty-eighth time — against a death in 459. Secondary accounts widely give thirty-six or thirty-seven. We follow the authority and record the variants here.
Open — held for DGAMThe baptistery's distance from the church
Published accounts place it about 200 m south; the Directorate-General of Antiquities gives about 300 m from the southern façade. We follow the authority.
Open — held for DGAMThe height of the column
The accounts give between thirty-six and forty cubits — about eighteen to twenty metres. What survives today is a cubic base some two metres to a side, and one drum of the shaft about two metres high and 1.15 m across.
Open — held for DGAMThe events of 985 and 986
The available sources narrate the destruction and the siege in different terms and with different actors. Recorded here as dates and outcomes only.
Open — held for DGAMWhat stood before the church
The site was a hilltop enclosure before 476. What Simeon's own shelter and the first structures around the column looked like is not established here.
Open — held for DGAM04Images
Photographs are credited individually where they appear, and are used under their stated licences.
05Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. That applies particularly to anyone who has been to the site recently.