This is Sagila, one of 300 ancient Syrian villages the Byzantine olive grows. Provincial Byzantium preserved in fine-cut stone. Just off the main square is the public bathhouse, forerun of the Turkish bath.（取基督教“要敬神，先污身”之义）① Saint John cast whores and devils under one of these. This is Sagila’s cafe coming along all down on Main Street. Old soldiers and half-mad saints got drunk in bars like this. Money lenders, magistrates, and merchants, did their business here, can you hear the farmers, tough independent homesteaders, chuckling about the prices that the city folk were paying for their olive oil? Life was very good. There was time for both a devil and his buds （魔鬼的随从，指异教徒） and for the church and all its works.

 

If you’d come up this path fifteen hundreds years ago on the first of September, you’d have been accompanied by thousands of people shouting and singing  praises to the lord, it was the feast day of Saint Simon of the pillar.

 

The first place these processions came through is this great baptistery. Ten thousand people, whole city is full, have been baptized in this room in a single day. And then out there they all went praising the lord onwards to the church, the saint.

 

It's Roman architectures in the course, arches, vaults, and column tops, but now these Christian crosses too. The ancient forms are turning into something else. See, the wind of faith （指基督教信仰） is bending all those ancient pagan patterns. This is the star that would become Byzantium. And at the church’s hub, the remains of the fifty-foot column on which Saint Simon lived. So was this weird man who lived up a pillar and half the world had come to see him, when he died, they built this beautiful dancing church in his honor. Well, as a young man, Simon had worn cloth so rough that made men bleed, many dreamt up the idea of chaining his left leg to a large rock, that before he went on the column.