About ephesus.net

Is this the official website of Ephesus?

No. ephesus.net is an independent guide. It is not the website of the Ephesus Archaeological Site, of the Ephesus Museum, or of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and it does not sell entry tickets.

Tickets and museum passes are sold through the Ministry’s own channels. Our tickets and opening hours page names them, quotes the official prices and says when each figure was last checked.

How are the facts checked?

Every fact on the site comes from a single register of checked claims. Historical claims require at least two independent publishers. For changing visitor information, an issuing authority’s own published notice can stand alone. Each entry in the register records one claim, the sources it rests on, how confident we are in it, and the date it was checked.

The rules behind that register are strict on purpose:

• Two independent sources for historical claims. Two websites repeating the same original count as one. A search engine’s summary or a snippet of a page is never counted as a source; the page itself has to be read.
• Specialists first. We look first to the excavators, the Austrian team whose excavations began in 1895¹, and to their publications; then to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, UNESCO, peer-reviewed research, the museums that hold finds from Ephesus, and the major encyclopedias.
• Wikipedia as a lead, not a source. We read it in several languages to find leads and to cross-check, and never rely on it alone. Where it is wrong, we say so without fuss.
• A citation on every factual sentence. The small numbers in the text lead to the list of sources at the foot of each page.

The site’s build enforces these rules as well as the editors. Historical claims with fewer than two independent publishers cannot be published. Prices, hours, closures and transport or visitor statistics can use a single official source when it is the issuing authority itself. The source must have been read in full, and the information still carries a checked date and expires if it is not reviewed.

What happens when the sources disagree?

We show the disagreement instead of quietly picking a winner. A careful reference says “estimates range from X to Y” and explains who says what.

The Great Theatre is a good example. The excavators put its Roman capacity at about 20,000, whereas other published figures run to 24,000 and 25,000²; the site gives all three and cites each. The completion date of the Library of Celsus is another: scholars place it anywhere from the 110s to around AD 135³. Wherever a fact is disputed or rests on thin evidence, the wording is required to hedge, and review checks that it really does.

Errors repeated widely enough to need answering head-on have a page of their own, what guidebooks get wrong, where each correction is set beside its evidence.

How are legends and religious traditions handled?

Traditions are reported as traditions, with their own history, and never as established events. Ephesus matters to Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians and to Muslims, and the site is written to be accurate and respectful for all of them.

In practice that means recording, for instance, that the Catholic Church allows and encourages pilgrimage to the House of the Virgin Mary without having pronounced on whether Mary lived there⁴. It means noting that several places besides Ephesus are identified with the cave of the Seven Sleepers⁵. Quotations from scripture and from ancient authors are kept short, and are either taken from public-domain translations or rendered afresh from the original.

How are prices and opening hours kept up to date?

Prices, opening hours, closures and transport details change, so each is taken from an official source and shown with the date it was checked. The build warns when one of these values is more than 60 days old and will not publish it once it passes 120 days without a fresh check.

Announced changes are shown before they take effect. The Ministry, for example, has already published the prices that apply from 1 April 2027⁶, so the tickets page gives both the current and the coming figures. Where official pages contradict each other, as they sometimes do on opening times, we say so rather than choose one.

How is the site written?

Each language is composed from the fact register for readers of that language, not translated from English. We write the pages using only the checked register, then review each language for accuracy and natural, current usage.

A page shows a reviewer’s name only when that person has actually reviewed it. The site does not use invented authors or personas.

Where do the photographs come from?

Photographs come from openly licensed images on Wikimedia Commons, from the free-licence libraries of Unsplash and Pexels, and from the publisher’s own archive. Photographs carry no credit line of their own: the author, source and licence of every image are gathered on the credits page. Licences that forbid commercial use or adaptation are not used, because the publisher is a commercial company. All images are stored and served from this site.

Does the site track visitors?

No. ephesus.net sets no cookies and leaves no similar tracking data on your device. Pages load nothing from other companies’ servers: there are no analytics scripts, no advertising, and no embedded maps, videos or fonts from third parties.

Found a mistake?

Tell us through the corrections form, and include the page and, if you can, a source.

Each report is checked against the register and its sources. If the evidence supports the correction, we fix the register entry and every page, in every language, that relies on it, and record the date of the change. If the evidence does not support it, we will explain why. Reports that point to a genuine disagreement between specialists are handled like any other dispute: the page is changed to show the range.