Alypius the Stylite was a seventh-century ascetic of Adrianopolis (Hadrianopolis) in Paphlagonia, a region of northern Asia Minor. He belongs to the tradition of the stylites, monastics who pursued their asceticism atop a pillar, and is remembered for the exceptional length of his life on the column. The synaxarion relates that he was raised by a widowed Christian mother of marked piety, who distributed her wealth to the poor and herself entered the diaconate and an ascetic manner of life. He was educated under the bishop Theodore, in whose service the tradition places his early ordination as a deacon.
When Alypius sought permission to withdraw as a hermit, the bishop is said to have refused. According to his life, a vision of the Great Martyr Euphemia directed him instead to return to Adrianopolis, where he raised a church in her honor on the site of a ruined pagan temple. Beside this church he erected a pillar and took up the stylite's vocation, which the sources record he sustained for fifty-three years of fasting, prayer, and counsel to those who came to him. The tradition relates that he at first stood beneath a protective roof but later removed it, choosing to endure the elements unsheltered.
Two monastic communities grew up at the foot of his column, one for men and one for women, and Alypius served as spiritual director of both; his life relates that his own mother and sister lived in the women's house. He thus stands not only as a solitary ascetic but as the founder and guide of a double monastery. In his final years, by tradition for the last fourteen, his legs weakened so that he could no longer stand, and he passed that period lying on his side without abandoning his pillar.
Alypius reposed in the year 640, having reached an age the tradition gives as one hundred and eighteen years. He was buried in the church of Euphemia he had founded, and his relics were associated with healings of those who came in faith. He is commemorated on November 26, and later tradition counts him, with Symeon the Stylite the Elder and Daniel the Stylite, among the foremost of the pillar-dwelling ascetics.
