🇹🇷 Turkey · Aegean
Walking through Ephesus is as close as you can get to strolling through a great city of the Roman Empire. Here you do not have to imagine much: the marble streets are still there, lined with columns, temples, fountains, shops and statues; water ran through its pipes and its public latrines; and at the end of the main avenue the two-storey façade of the Library of Celsus rises, one of the most photographed monuments of the ancient world. Ephesus was one of the largest, richest and most sophisticated cities in the Mediterranean, capital of the Roman province of Asia, and today it is Turkey's archaeological jewel.
Its history is that of a prosperous port that drew Greeks, Lydians, Persians, Macedonians and Romans, and that housed one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the colossal Temple of Artemis, today reduced to a lonely column in a meadow. It was also a key centre of early Christianity: Saint Paul preached here (and set off a riot among the silversmiths who lived off the cult of Artemis), a decisive council was held here, and tradition places the last days of the apostle John and of the Virgin Mary nearby. Few places pack in so much Greco-Roman and Christian history.
This guide helps you make the most of it: how to get there from Selçuk or İzmir, which entrance to start from so you walk downhill, what not to miss (the Library, the Great Theatre, the astonishing Terrace Houses with their frescoes and mosaics), how much the tickets cost — among the priciest in the country — and how to combine Ephesus with the House of the Virgin, the Museum and Şirince. One golden tip: get up early. With the ruins almost empty and the morning light, Ephesus is pure magic.
Ephesus was founded by Ionian Greek colonists around the 10th century BC, next to an ancient sanctuary of an Anatolian mother goddess whom the Greeks identified with Artemis. In her honour the great Temple of Artemis was raised, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The city prospered under the Lydians, the Persians and, above all, after being refounded on its present site by Alexander the Great's general Lysimachus in the 4th century BC. Under Rome it reached its greatest splendour as capital of the province of Asia and one of the great ports of the Mediterranean, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. It was a key centre of early Christianity: Saint Paul visited it, tradition places the Virgin Mary and the apostle John there, and it hosted an ecumenical council in the year 431. The gradual silting up of its harbour by sediment from the Cayster river pushed it further from the sea and condemned it to decline; in Byzantine and Ottoman times it shrank to a village, and finally to abandonment. Rediscovered and excavated from the 19th century onward, it is now a World Heritage Site. Its full and fascinating history is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The coast where Greek philosophy was born and where Ephesus, Smyrna and Halicarnassus shone: a shoreline of Ionian cities, ancient wonders and the trauma of 1922.
Read the history of Aegean →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the marble Roman Ephesus we visit today existed, this corner of the coast of Asia Minor worshipped a very ancient Anatolian mother goddess, lady of fertility, nature and animals. When Ionian Greek colonists arrived around the 10th century BC and founded the city of Ephesus, they identified that local deity with their own goddess Artemis, and so the Artemis of Ephesus was born, a peculiar figure covered with mysterious oval lumps (interpreted as breasts, eggs or bull testicles, symbols of fertility), very different from the huntress Artemis of the rest of Greece.
In honour of this goddess the Temple of Artemis, the Artemision, was raised, which became one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Rebuilt several times, in its grandest version (6th century BC) it was the largest temple in the Greek world, with more than a hundred towering marble columns. It was so famous that it drew pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean and made Ephesus a religious and commercial centre of the first order. The writer Antipater of Sidon, who drew up one of the lists of the wonders, wrote that before the temple of Ephesus the others were left in the shade.
The city, set beside an excellent natural harbour at the mouth of the Cayster river, prospered under the rule of the kingdom of Lydia (that of the legendary king Croesus, who helped pay for the temple) and then under the Persian Empire. It was also the birthplace of brilliant minds, such as the philosopher Heraclitus, the man of 'everything flows' and 'you will not bathe twice in the same river', one of the most influential thinkers of archaic Greece.
When Alexander the Great swept away the Persian Empire in the 4th century BC, Ephesus received him as a liberator. The city, however, had a chronic problem: its harbour silted up again and again with river sediment. After Alexander's death, one of his generals and successors, Lysimachus, took a drastic decision: he refounded Ephesus a little further away, on the site we visit today, between two hills, and gave it a great wall and a modern street plan. The story goes that the Ephesians refused to move out of their old houses, and that Lysimachus forced them by blocking the sewers so that the old city flooded during a storm. That is how Hellenistic Ephesus was born.
The great splendour, however, came under Roman rule, from the 2nd century BC. Ephesus became the capital of the Roman province of Asia, the richest in the East, and one of the largest cities in the whole Empire, with a population some estimate at 200,000 or more at its height, around the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Only Rome, Alexandria and Antioch were bigger. It was a great port through which trade between East and West passed, and a monumental, cosmopolitan city.
Almost all the buildings we admire today belong to that golden age: the Library of Celsus, the Great Theatre for 25,000 people, the Temple of Hadrian, the fountains, the baths, the agora, the luxurious Terrace Houses of the aristocracy, the porticoed marble streets. Ephesus had running water, sewers, public latrines, lighting on some streets and every luxury of a great Roman city. Emperors such as Hadrian visited and embellished it. It was, without doubt, one of the jewels of the ancient world.
Ephesus holds a central place in the history of early Christianity. In the middle of the 1st century, the apostle Paul of Tarsus lived and preached in the city for about three years, and from here he wrote some of his letters; one of the epistles of the New Testament is addressed precisely to the community of the Ephesians. His preaching produced a famous episode: the silversmiths of Ephesus, craftsmen who made a living producing statuettes of the goddess Artemis, seeing their business threatened by the new cult, stirred up a great uproar in the Great Theatre with the cry 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!'. Paul had to leave the city.
Christian tradition also associates Ephesus with the apostle John, author of the fourth gospel, who is said to have spent his last years here and to have been buried on Ayasuluk hill, where centuries later the emperor Justinian raised a great basilica in his honour. And a deeply rooted tradition holds that John brought the Virgin Mary with him, since Jesus is said to have entrusted him with the care of his mother, and that Mary spent her last days in a house on the mountain above Ephesus, today the shrine of Meryem Ana Evi.
With the triumph of Christianity, Ephesus became one of the most important seats of the Church. In the year 431 it hosted a decisive event: the Council of Ephesus, an ecumenical council that proclaimed Mary 'Theotokos' (Mother of God) and condemned the doctrine of Nestorius as heresy, defining fundamental dogmas of Christianity. That this council took place here, in the city of the great mother goddess Artemis, has a symbolic resonance that has not escaped historians.
The greatness of Ephesus always carried within it the seed of its ruin. The Cayster river, which flowed into the sea beside the city, washed down enormous quantities of sediment that, century after century, filled in the bay and silted up the harbour. The Ephesians fought the mud for generations, dredging channels to keep open the access to the sea on which all their commercial wealth depended. But it was a lost battle: little by little the coastline retreated, the harbour turned into an unhealthy marsh and the city, once on the shore of the Aegean, found itself further and further inland (today the sea is several kilometres away).
Without a harbour there was no trade, and without trade the great city gradually lost population and splendour. Other misfortunes were added to that underlying cause: earthquakes that damaged the buildings, Gothic raids in the 3rd century that sacked the city and the Temple of Artemis, malaria breeding in the marshes and the instability of late antiquity. The old cult of Artemis faded with the triumph of Christianity, and the great temple, already in ruins, was dismantled; its marble was reused in other buildings.
In Byzantine times, the population withdrew to Ayasuluk hill, around the basilica of Saint John, abandoning the lower city. Under the rule of the Seljuk Turks and then the Ottomans, the place, by then known as Ayasuluk (later Selçuk), was reduced to a small town, while great Roman Ephesus slept buried under the river's silt. For centuries, that wonder of the ancient world was only a name in books and a set of ruins covered in scrub.
The rebirth of Ephesus as one of the world's great archaeological sites began in the 19th century. In 1869, a British engineer and archaeologist, John Turtle Wood, funded by the British Museum, became obsessed with finding the legendary Temple of Artemis, whose exact location nobody knew. After years of frustrating digs in the marshy plain, he finally hit on its foundations, buried under metres of mud. The finds were taken to London, where fragments are still kept.
From the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, Austrian archaeologists (the Austrian Archaeological Institute has directed the excavations for more than a century) and Turkish ones gradually brought the great Roman city to light: the Library of Celsus, the Temple of Hadrian, the marble streets, the agora, the theatre and, in recent decades, the extraordinary Terrace Houses with their frescoes and mosaics were unearthed and partly reconstructed. Every excavation season reveals something new about a city that still keeps much of its secrets underground.
In 2015, UNESCO inscribed Ephesus on the World Heritage list, recognising its exceptional value as one of the most complete Greco-Roman cities in the world, evidence of urban life in antiquity, and as one of the great pagan and later Christian pilgrimage centres of the Mediterranean. Today Ephesus is the most visited site in Turkey, with millions of visitors a year, many of them arriving on cruise ships that dock at nearby Kuşadası.
For the traveller, walking through Ephesus is one of the great experiences of the ancient world: strolling its marble streets, climbing the tiers of its theatre, looking at the façade of the Library of Celsus gilded by the sun and glimpsing the daily life of the Romans in the Terrace Houses. Beneath the lonely column of the Artemision, sometimes topped by a stork, you can sense the shadow of one of the seven wonders. Few places make the greatness — and the fragility — of civilisations so tangible.