Every heard of St. Simeon Stylites? Most haven’t, but what he did is pretty unbelievable and deserves our attention. Simeon, who was born in 388, was a fifth-century ascetic saint who lived on a ...

Editor’s Note: CNN Travel’s series often carry sponsorship originating from the countries and regions we profile. However, CNN retains full editorial control over all of its reports. Read the policy.

For 68 years, St. Simeon the Stylite, the Younger (521-597), lived atop a pillar, high on a hill in what is now southern Turkey. Pilgrims would come to hear his words of enlightenment when he wasn’t ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. A 16th-century icon of Simeon Stylites. At the base of the pillar is his mother's body. The icon in ...

In an isolated part of the Caucasus, a monk is spending his days in prayer and silence atop a 40-meter pillar of limestone in western Georgia (near the town of Chiatura). The Katskhi Pillar was used ...

In Georgia's remote Imereti region, monks scale the 40m-high Katskhi Pillar in a daring, nerve-jangling ascent. The reason: to get closer to God. As I drove through the remote Imereti region of ...

To a modern eye, St. Simeon Stylites is likely to seem a kind of 5th-Century Shipwreck Kelly*—a symbol of ascetic reductio ad absurdum. To that view, his 38-year residence atop a pillar was only a ...

The Syrian monastery dedicated to St Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century monk who set a trend for hermits to live on top of pillars, has become the latest victim of the country's civil war. Activists ...