The ancient city of Ephesus

The Küçük Menderes, which the Greeks called the Kaystros, has been dropping silt at its mouth for about seven thousand years, and every harbour Ephesus built ended up stranded behind the new shoreline¹³. Any distance quoted for Ephesus depends on the point chosen. The Roman harbour canal alone ran about 4 km west of the basin, a Byzantine extension took it roughly 3 km further, and the old harbour is best described as several kilometres, probably 5–6 km, from today’s coast¹⁴.

The problem was old even in Lysimachus’s day. Geoarchaeologists read his move as partly practical: the harbour near the Artemision was already silting, while the bay between Pion and Preon still offered deep anchorage¹⁵. The Ephesians did not want to go, and Strabo has Lysimachus flush them out by stopping up the drains in a rainstorm¹⁶. He also renamed the city Arsinoeia after his wife, a name that lapsed when he died in 281 BC¹⁷.

Rome inherited the fight against the silt. One earlier attempt had made things worse: according to Strabo, a mole built for Attalus II of Pergamon to deepen the harbour mouth caught the mud instead¹⁸. Inscriptions record clearance after clearance from Nero’s reign to the mid-3rd century, including a ban on dumping into the harbour canal¹⁹. Once the basin below the city had been dredged into shape, the advancing delta forced the Romans to cut a long canal westwards to reach open water²⁰. The basin itself survives as a small marshy lake²¹.

The Hellenistic city was planned on a regular grid²², inside walls that followed the ridge of Bülbüldağ over a length of more than 4 km⁸. One street ignores the grid entirely. Curetes Street cuts diagonally down the valley, and archaeologists take that as a sign that it is older than the plan, a processional route to Artemis that the new city had to accommodate²³.

That route was still in use under Trajan. A decree of about AD 104 records the gift of Gaius Vibius Salutaris: a set of gold and silver images, an Artemis flanked by two stags among them, which were paraded from the Artemision to assemblies in the theatre, coming in through the Magnesian Gate and going out through the Coressian Gate²⁴. Today’s walk joins the same two points, the Magnesian Gate and the theatre.

UNESCO’s criterion (iii) picks out four monuments here: Terrace House 2, the Serapeion, the Temple of Hadrian and the Library of Celsus²⁵. Of the four components in the World Heritage property, the ancient city is by far the largest, at 614.76 ha¹¹.

Starting at the Upper Gate means walking downhill, which is the main thing to settle when planning a visit. Ephesus has two entrances with ticket offices: the Upper Gate, south of the city, near the ancient Magnesian Gate, and the Lower Gate on the north side, towards Selçuk¹⁰. From the top the route drops through the upper city, down Curetes Street and past the library towards the theatre and the Lower Gate, the same order the Ephesus map follows. Starting at the bottom works too; it is the same walk uphill.

For cruise passengers the Lower Gate is the nearer one, about 19 km by road from the Kuşadası cruise port against about 23 km to the Upper Gate²⁶. Those road distances shape the transfer from the Kuşadası cruise port, and the trains and roads from further afield are on getting to Ephesus.

The largest gate of Ephesus stood on the road to Magnesia, some 300 m south of the modern upper entrance²⁷. It was long assumed to belong to Lysimachus’s walls, until excavation in 2008–09 dated it to around 100 BC; it went on serving as a gate into late antiquity²⁷. John Turtle Wood first uncovered it in 1869²⁷, having tracked the procession route described in the Salutaris inscription he had found at the theatre²⁸.

The State Agora, sometimes called the Upper Agora, was the civic square of Roman Ephesus. Its open space, framed by halls, measured about 58 by 155 m, roughly 9,000 m², and it grew over ground that had held archaic graves²⁹. Along its north side ran the Basilike Stoa, a hall about 167 m long dedicated in AD 11 by Gaius Sextilius Pollio and his family to Artemis Ephesia, Augustus, Tiberius and the city, with a dedication in Latin and Greek along the architrave³⁰. Bulls’ heads decorated its Ionic capitals³⁰.

The temple at the centre of the square was long called a Temple of Isis. That label is now doubted, and the building is read more cautiously as an Augustan sanctuary, perhaps of Divus Julius and Roma, perhaps of Augustus himself³¹. A sanctuary of that kind is attested at Ephesus: in 29 BC Octavian gave the Roman citizens of Asia leave to build one there³².

The small theatre by the State Agora is usually signposted as the Odeon, but it was the Bouleuterion, the council house³³. It was built around AD 150 by Publius Vedius Antoninus and probably had a roof³³. It seated about 1,400 people, or 1,500 in some accounts³⁴.

The Prytaneion was the seat of the city’s executive and held the sacred hearth of Hestia. At Ephesus it was tended by the Curetes, priests linked to Artemis, and their names were inscribed on its columns³⁵. The building visible today is Augustan, was renovated in the Severan period and had been demolished before about AD 400³⁶. Franz Miltner’s team uncovered it in 1955–56³⁷.

The Prytaneion’s most famous finds were buried inside it. In 1956 the excavators found Roman marble statues of Artemis Ephesia there: the “Colossal Artemis”, the “Beautiful Artemis” and a smaller figure³⁸. The Colossal Artemis stands about 3 m high, wears a headdress of stacked temple façades and has lions, bulls and griffins on the panels of her skirt; her separately made hands are lost³⁹. The Beautiful Artemis is a little later, 2nd century AD, unusually well preserved, with a deer at each side⁴⁰. Both are in the Ephesus Museum at Selçuk, and both are Roman versions of the cult image, not the cult statue itself⁴¹.

A great artificial terrace nearby carried the temple once called the Temple of Domitian and now named the Temple of the Sebastoi, the emperors. Its dedication in AD 89/90 made Ephesus neokoros, official warden of an imperial-cult temple, for the first time⁴². The temple had eight by thirteen columns and stood over vaulted substructures that later served as an inscription museum, now closed⁴³. Once Domitian’s memory had been condemned, the Flavian family as a whole took over the cult⁴⁴.

A colossal marble head and forearm from its cult statue are in the Selçuk museum. The head is traditionally identified as Domitian, but many scholars now see Titus, and the standing figure is reckoned at about 7 m⁴⁵.

Fountains and honorific monuments crowd the square. An inscription dates the Hydreion fountain to AD 198–211, the joint reign of Septimius Severus and Caracalla⁴⁶. The Pollio Monument honours Gaius Sextilius Pollio, who paid for an aqueduct and the Basilike Stoa, and was erected by his stepson⁴⁷. The marble Polyphemus group, of the 1st century BC, turned up at the Pollio fountain, although it had been made for the pediment of the temple in the State Agora; it too is now in the Selçuk museum⁴⁸.

Gaius Memmius, grandson of the dictator Sulla, consul in 34 BC and later governor of Asia, set up this monument under Augustus⁴⁹. It honoured three generations of his family and recalled Sulla’s victory over Mithridates⁴⁹, an awkward reminder in a city that had welcomed Mithridates in 88 BC and torn down Rome’s statues⁵⁰.

At the top of Curetes Street, reliefs of Herakles in his lion skin mark the Hercules Gate, a late antique structure that narrowed the street and closed it to wheeled traffic⁵¹. The reliefs themselves are older pieces, reused from the 2nd century⁵¹. From here on, Curetes Street was a street for people on foot.

Below the Hercules Gate the street runs down the valley floor as far as the library⁴. Its ancient name was probably Embolos, “the wedge”; the modern name comes from lists of Curetes priests, taken from the Prytaneion and found reused along the street⁵².

The most recent study gives its length as about 210–216 m. In its last phase the roadway was 6–8 m wide between colonnaded halls 3.5–5 m deep, and over its length it loses about 20 m of height, from roughly 30 m above sea level at the Hercules Gate to under 10 m at the library⁹. The lower part of the street has evidence reaching back to the 3rd century BC⁹.

What visitors see is a late Roman street patched after disaster. Earthquakes damaged it in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and after the 4th-century quake columns were brought in from other buildings, the Prytaneion among them⁵³. At night, late antique inscriptions tell us, lamps lit the processional axis from Harbour Street up into this street⁵⁴. Franz Miltner cleared it in the 1950s to join the monuments into a route for visitors, the moment Ephesus began to be shown as a landscape of ruins⁵⁵.

The Nymphaeum of Trajan was dedicated to Artemis and to Trajan by Tiberius Claudius Aristion and Julia Lydia Laterane, his wife, who also paid for a water channel 210 stadia long to feed it⁵⁶. A stage-like front about 9.5 m high rose over a basin almost 12 m long and 5.5 m wide, and the central apse held a colossal Trajan, around 4 m tall if the surviving foot is any guide⁵⁷. Only its base and feet remain on site⁵⁷. Statues from the fountain, including Dionysus, a reclining satyr, Aphrodite, Androclus and Nerva, are in the Selçuk museum⁵⁸.

Aristion was a figure of real standing. Pliny the Younger records a “Claudius Aristo”, the leading citizen of Ephesus, being acquitted of charges before Trajan⁵⁹.

Two names circulate for one building. Publius Quintilius Valens Varius built these baths in the late 1st century or the early years of the 2nd, and a Christian woman named Scholastikia paid for their renovation in the 4th or 5th⁶⁰. Her headless seated statue still stands in the baths⁶¹. Architectural pieces from the demolished Prytaneion were built into them, which shows the Prytaneion had come down by the end of the 4th century or around 400⁶².

North-east of the corner where Marble Street meets Curetes Street is a public latrine of the 1st century AD. Its marble benches had seats over a flushing channel and were arranged around a central open pool⁶³.

The house next to it is still sold to visitors as the brothel of Ephesus, one of the stories guidebooks get wrong. The idea goes back to Franz Miltner, who read the latrine’s building inscription in 1957 as evidence for a public brothel next door⁶⁴. When Werner Jobst went over the evidence again, in 1976/77, he ruled that out⁶⁵. A building survey in 2000–01 established what stood there instead: a peristyle house, first about 742.5 m² and then 879.5 m² once a vaulted reception suite and an apsed hall with a banquet mosaic were added, divided up in the end into workshops⁶⁶.

The small, richly carved front on Curetes Street is the so-called Temple of Hadrian. Publius Quintilius Valens Varius, the builder of the baths behind it, dedicated it with his wife and daughter to Artemis of Ephesus, to Hadrian and to the people⁶⁷, and the temple and the baths were planned together⁶⁸. Its porch has an arched lintel with a bust of Tyche on the keystone⁶⁹.

Almost nothing about it is simple. The inscription is read as 117/118, but other accounts run as late as 138⁷⁰, and whether the building was ever a temple of Hadrian at all is openly questioned⁷¹. The frieze in the porch is not Hadrianic but belongs to the 3rd or 4th century⁷², and the slabs on the building are casts of originals in the Selçuk museum⁷³.

On the slope opposite the Temple of Hadrian, a modern roof covers Terrace House 2, a block of about 4,000 m²⁷⁴. Behind its walls were six houses, later seven, each a peristyle house on three terraces⁷⁵. Building began around the turn of the era, under Augustus and Tiberius⁷⁶; a 3rd-century earthquake, in the third quarter of the century, ended its life as housing, and parts of it then held workshops and mills⁷⁷.

The block keeps more 2nd- and 3rd-century wall painting than anywhere else in the Roman East, along with around a hundred mosaics and a great deal of marble wall cladding⁷⁸. One unit belonged to a priest of Dionysus, Gaius Flavius Furius Aptus, who added marble banqueting halls around AD 120 and 150⁷⁹. Scratched into the walls are drawings, poems and lists of everyday prices⁸⁰. The houses have been open to visitors since the roof went up in 1999/2000⁸¹.

The Terrace Houses need a ticket of their own. Combined 72-hour tickets pair them with the main site, and the larger combination adds the museum and St John’s: €52 / €65⁸² (checked on 14 September 2026).

At the foot of Curetes Street the view is closed by the two-storey façade of the Library of Celsus, 21 m wide and just over 16 m high⁹⁷. It honoured Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus⁹⁸, a senator who had been consul in AD 92⁹⁹, and it is also his tomb: he lies in a marble sarcophagus in a vaulted chamber under the apse, an honour normally kept for heroes and founders¹⁰⁰. His son Aquila built it as his father’s memorial¹⁰¹, probably in the 110s and 120s, since no completion date is securely attested¹⁰².

The front uses optical corrections to look wider than it is¹⁰³. It has never been moved. The façade stands on its original foundations, and in 1970–78 it was put back up there from its own fallen blocks¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁵.

The triple gate beside the library, at the south-east corner of the Commercial Agora, was built in 4/3 BC¹⁰⁶. Its builders, Mazaeus and Mithridates, were freedmen: former slaves of Augustus and of Agrippa respectively¹⁰⁷. The Latin inscription honours Augustus, Livia, Agrippa and Julia as their patrons¹⁰⁸, and the date comes from Augustus’s titles in it, his 12th consulship and 20th year of tribunician power¹⁰⁹. The inscriptions were in Latin over the side passages and Greek over the centre, originally in gilded bronze letters¹¹⁰. The gate was re-erected in 1980–89, largely from its own stones, by the architect who had rebuilt the library, with the same patron paying¹¹¹.

Through the gate lies the Tetragonos Agora, the city’s great market square. It was laid out in the 3rd century BC over an 8th-century BC village and its cemetery, enlarged in the early Imperial period, heavily restored in the late 4th century AD and reorganised for the last time in the 6th¹¹². It is roughly square, about 111 m a side, with three gates and around a hundred shops, workshops and storerooms behind its colonnades¹¹³.

Marble Street, named for its paving, links the library square with the theatre⁵. A Greek verse inscription found beside it honours Eutropios, probably a governor of Asia, for paving the city’s streets; a 5th-century marble bust in Vienna is conventionally identified as his portrait, likely but not certainly¹¹⁴.

Guides like to stop at a slab carved with a foot, a woman’s head and a heart-like shape, and call it the first advertisement in history, pointing the way to the brothel. That reading has no support, and what the carving actually means is uncertain¹¹⁵¹¹⁶. Since the “brothel” was a private house, the story fails twice over.

The Great Theatre stands where Marble Street ends⁵. Construction probably started in the second quarter of the 2nd century BC, according to the excavators’ final publication, rather than in Lysimachus’s time, where popular accounts tend to put it¹¹⁷. An inscription dates its three-storey marble stage building to AD 85¹¹⁸, and the Roman enlargements took the auditorium to almost 150 m across¹¹⁹.

Its capacity has shrunk in the literature: the final publication allows about 20,000, while the 24,000–25,000 of older and official sources still circulates¹²⁰. The theatre fell out of use around the start of the 7th century¹²¹.

Acts 19 sets a riot here, stirred up by Demetrius, a maker of silver Artemis shrines, whose fellow craftsmen feared for their trade; for some two hours the crowd in the theatre chanted for Artemis of the Ephesians until the town clerk sent them home¹²². The theatre in that account is identified with this one¹²³, and the text has St Paul held back from going in¹²⁴.

From the theatre a straight colonnaded street runs west towards the old harbour. It is named after Emperor Arcadius, who reigned 395–408, rebuilt it and raised its level⁶. Sources give its length as anything from just over 500 m to 570 m; the roadway was about 11 m wide, with a portico about 5 m deep along each side¹²⁵. Inscriptions of late antiquity show it too was lit with lamps⁵⁴.

It ended at the Middle Harbour Gate, one of three harbour gates built around the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD; the South Gate had five passages, the Middle and North gates three each¹²⁶.

Ephesus had four large Roman bath-gymnasia¹²⁷. The Harbour Baths, probably begun under Domitian, are the biggest of the bath complexes that can be seen at Ephesus today¹²⁸. They were repaired in the 4th century; the popular name “Baths of Constantine” and its attribution to a particular emperor are not reliable¹²⁹. Beside them, the Halls of Verulanus formed an exercise court of about 200 by 240 m, named after Claudius Verulanus, high priest of Asia, who paid for its marble cladding under Hadrian¹³⁰. The Theatre Gymnasium stands on Harbour Street near the theatre and is only partly excavated¹³¹.

The long ruin of the Church of Mary was fitted into the southern hall of a precinct for Zeus Olympios and Hadrian, a hall about 263 m long and 30 m wide¹³². It has an octagonal marble-clad baptistery on its west side¹³³.

Two church councils met in Christian Ephesus: the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 and a second in 449¹³⁴. The council of 431 opened on 22 June under Cyril of Alexandria¹³⁵, and tradition places it in this church. Both the venue and the date are argued over: recent excavation suggests the hall was adapted for the council, and a dedication to Mary before about 500 looks impossible¹³⁶.

The Vedius Gymnasium was a bath-gymnasium of almost 13,000 m², opened between AD 147 and 149 and paid for by Marcus Claudius Publius Vedius Antoninus Phaedrus Sabinianus¹²⁷. Whether it was dedicated to Artemis or to Aphrodite, together with Antoninus Pius, is disputed in the sources¹³⁷. The statue of the river god Kaystros from its cold bath is in the İzmir Archaeology Museum¹³⁸.

The stadium below Panayırdağ was rebuilt under Nero at the expense of Gaius Stertinius Orpex, his wife and his daughter¹³⁹. In the late Roman period its curved eastern end, about 50 by 42 m, was closed off as an arena for gladiators and wild-beast shows¹⁴⁰. Its seating was later carried off for building stone, some of it for the Basilica of St John, and a church rose over part of it in the 5th century¹⁴¹.

A small cave on the hillside of Bülbüldağ, just south of the city, served as a church from late antiquity until the 19th century¹⁴⁹. In 1998 Renate Pillinger of the University of Vienna found paintings under the later whitewash, among them a scene of Paul teaching Thecla, who listens at a window while her mother Theocleia watches, each figure named in painted Greek¹⁵⁰. Restoration of the paintings took from 2000 to 2010¹⁵¹.

On the eastern slope of Panayırdağ lies a late antique cemetery and cave church associated with the Seven Sleepers, excavated by the Austrian team in the late 1920s¹⁵². The legend tells of young Christians walled into a cave under Decius who woke under Theodosius II, and the Qur’an tells a version of the story in Sura 18¹⁵³. The excavators counted hundreds of burials from the 5th and 6th centuries, inscriptions calling on the Sleepers, and a great heap of clay lamps¹⁵⁴. Ephesus is not the only claimant: Muslim tradition mostly places the cave at Tarsus or Afşin, and other candidates include al-Raqim near Amman, Damascus and Nakhchivan¹⁵⁵.

At least six aqueducts of different sizes brought water into the city¹⁵⁶. One of them was the 210-stadia channel Aristion paid for to feed Trajan’s fountain⁵⁶. Water also drove mills, including a 6th-century water-powered stone saw with a crank and connecting rod¹⁵⁶.

The size of Roman Ephesus is disputed. Recent density models put it at roughly 34,000 to 72,000 people; the traditional figure, still found in older books, is 200,000 to 250,000¹⁵⁷. Strabo, writing under Augustus or Tiberius, called Ephesus the largest trading centre in Asia on this side of the Taurus and said it was growing daily¹⁵⁸.

The end took about a thousand years. In the mid-3rd century, under Gallienus, an earthquake and Gothic raiders arriving by sea wrecked much of the city, and the excavators place the fall of the Terrace Houses in the third quarter of that century¹⁵⁹. Constantine, Constantius II and Arcadius rebuilt and embellished it¹⁶⁰. Around 614–616 large parts were probably destroyed again, and the wall built afterwards took in less than half of the ancient city¹⁶¹.

In the 7th and 8th centuries earthquakes, Arab raids and economic change broke Ephesus into smaller centres: the old city near the harbour, a fortified Ayasuluk hill and the coast at Anaia¹⁶². The lower city was not empty even then. South of the Church of Mary, excavation shows houses occupied until the 12th century, fields after that, and a final flicker of activity in the 14th¹⁶³. By the 15th century the ancient city was completely abandoned¹⁶⁴; Ayasuluk hill, one of the centres it had split into, belongs to the landscape around Ephesus.

The British railway engineer John Turtle Wood came first, searching for the Temple of Artemis for the British Museum from 1863; on the way he partly uncovered the Bouleuterion and the Great Theatre¹⁶⁵. Otto Benndorf of the University of Vienna proposed an Austrian excavation in 1893, work began in 1895, and he founded the Austrian Archaeological Institute in 1898¹². Fieldwork stopped for the two world wars, resumed in 1926 and restarted with annual campaigns under Franz Miltner in 1956¹⁶⁶. The Turkish government halted the Austrian excavation in October 2016 and let it resume in May 2018¹⁶⁷.

1. early 3rd century BCLysimachus refounds the city between Pion and Preon³
2. c. 100 BCThe Magnesian Gate is built²⁷
3. 4/3 BCGate of Mazaeus and Mithridates¹⁰⁶
4. AD 11Basilike Stoa dedicated on the State Agora³⁰
5. AD 85Three-storey stage building of the theatre¹¹⁸
6. AD 89/90Temple of the Sebastoi dedicated⁴²
7. AD 147–149Vedius Gymnasium opens¹²⁷
8. 3rd quarter of the 3rd centuryEarthquake destroys the Terrace Houses⁷⁷
9. 395–408Arcadius rebuilds Harbour Street⁶
10. 431Third Ecumenical Council meets at Ephesus¹³⁴
11. 15th centuryThe ancient city is completely abandoned¹⁶⁴
12. 1895Austrian excavations begin¹²
13. 2015UNESCO World Heritage listing¹¹