Ephesus

Ephesus is one of the largest Roman cities left standing in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few where you can walk a marble street from end to end and understand how a great ancient city worked. Founded by Ionian Greeks in the 10th century BC, it became one of the leading cities of Roman Asia, a centre of early Christianity and, until its harbour silted up, one of the busiest ports of the Aegean. The sea is now about 5 km away, and the ruins lie in a quiet valley beside the Turkish town of Selçuk.

The city was famous in antiquity for the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; today a single re-erected column in a marshy field outside Selçuk is all that marks it. Alexander the Great passed through, the city fell to Rome in 129 BC, and the apostle Paul lived here for about three years in the 50s AD. Tradition links Ephesus with the apostle John and with the last years of the Virgin Mary, and the Council of Ephesus met here in 431. Goths sacked the city in 263, an earthquake damaged it in 614, and as the harbour filled with river silt its people drifted away; by the 15th century it was abandoned. Excavations began in the 1860s, and the Austrian Archaeological Institute has led work on the site since the 1890s. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015.

Among the buildings along the way are the small roofed Odeon, which seated about 1,500, and the Temple of Hadrian, re-erected from its fragments, with casts of its reliefs in place. At the bottom stands the Library of Celsus, built around AD 125 by a son in memory of his father, a Roman governor who is buried beneath it; its two-storey facade was re-erected from original fragments between 1970 and 1978, and the reading rooms faced east to catch the morning light. The Great Theatre, which dominates the view down Harbour Street towards the vanished port, is with room for about 24,000 to 25,000 spectators; it was used in Roman times for gladiator fights as well as drama. Under a protective roof opposite the Temple of Hadrian, the Terrace Houses — six wealthy Roman homes with floor mosaics and wall paintings, some in use from the 1st century BC to the 7th century AD — show how the city's elite lived.

The site is large, and in summer an early start is wise. In Selçuk, the Ephesus Archaeological Museum holds many of the finest finds, and the hill of Ayasuluk above the town carries the ruins of the 6th-century Basilica of St John, the Isa Bey Mosque and a Byzantine castle.

Getting there

The ruins are about 2 km from the town of Selçuk. Selçuk railway station is served by İZBAN commuter trains and regional trains from İzmir. The nearest airport is İzmir Adnan Menderes International (ADB), about 43 km away. Many visitors also come on day trips from the resort town of Kuşadası.