Ayasuluk Hill Fortress

Two wall circuits, not one

The castle above Selçuk is often described with a single tower and gate count, but the sources disagree, and the disagreement is not a simple error to correct — it looks instead like two different fortification systems being counted separately. One figure, used elsewhere on this site, gives the castle fifteen towers and two gates, east and west². A dedicated excavation report instead gives the outer Byzantine fortress circuit twenty towers in total, six of them guarding entrance gates, and separately describes a distinct inner terrace wall, 1.60–1.90 m thick, running around the church’s atrium and apse, as a second fortification system on the same hill³. This page does not attempt to decide which published figure is right, because the honest answer is that they may both be right about different things: an inner terrace wall and an outer fortress circuit, not yet fully disentangled in the published record. Until they are, neither count should be read as settling the other.

What is firmer is the sequence the walls grew from. The Lysimachean city wall down in the lower city, for comparison, was, per the excavation report, 3–4 m thick, built of large rusticated ashlar with unmortared rubble fill and quarried on site — the old Koressos quarry pits were incorporated directly into its circuit⁴. As the city’s population later shrank well below what that huge Lysimachean circuit needed, a much smaller Byzantine wall, of rubble and hard mortar and incorporating reused material, replaced it on a reduced footprint, the report adds⁵ — the same pattern of shrinking, reusing and rebuilding that produced the hilltop fortress. Muss and Bammer report that much of the fortress’s own marble facing is reused Stadium seating, some pieces still carrying their original inscriptions and backrests, built into the wall at what look like essentially random points⁶.

When the city moved uphill

The shift from the lower city to this hill can be dated only loosely, but the evidence points to the early-to-mid 8th century. Administrative seals from the Bishop’s Palace stop appearing in the first third of the 8th century, which Ladstätter and Magdalino read as a sign that the episcopal and administrative centre moved to Ayasuluk around then — a geostrategic response to Arab attacks, since the hill faces the Anatolian hinterland¹⁴. The following century and a half, they note, is genuinely hard to date closely: coin circulation collapsed after the reign of Constans II, and the fine-dating pottery types of the period disappear from the record too, leaving the late 7th to late 9th century as a real dating gap rather than a documented sequence¹⁵.

A fortress, not quite a town

By the 11th century, the Life of St Lazarus records only the Ayasuluk administrative centre, beside the basilica, as still being called a “kastron” or “polis”; the surrounding valley below had emptied out¹⁶. That is not surprising given how little room the hilltop actually offered: Ladstätter and Magdalino calculate that once the basilica and the citadel are subtracted, only about 2.3 hectares of buildable land remained, which is a fort’s footprint, not a town’s¹⁷. Ladstätter and Magdalino, reading the archaeological evidence, argue against a simple story of Ephesus being abandoned wholesale in favour of this one hill; instead, two small Middle Byzantine towns most likely coexisted side by side, an argued model rather than a settled fact¹⁸. Devotion kept pace with defence, they add: in the 12th and 13th centuries, a chapel near the basilica’s treasury and the fortification’s entrance portal were both freshly frescoed with prophets, saints and St John himself¹⁹.

Continuity through conquest

The town’s political history was not as sharply punctuated as its name changes suggest. Ladstätter and Magdalino note that an earlier, brief Turkish occupation, from 1090 to 1096, had already come and gone before the better-known conquest of 1304, with Byzantine rule — and Ayasuluk as its centre — resuming in between²⁰. When the 1304 conquest did come, they find, it was not itself a sharp break in the settlement’s fabric: Turkish Ayasoluk grew directly out of the existing Byzantine settlement inside the old Artemision temenos, with its castle on the hill above²¹. Building reuse continued under the beyliks that followed, and heavily, the same account holds: spolia use by the western Anatolian beyliks was so thorough that a tomb inside the Artemision is built almost entirely from reused ancient fragments, not merely accented with them²². Even the modern place name, per Kraft and colleagues, is a 20th-century decision rather than an ancient survival: “Selçuk” was created only under Atatürk, a deliberate reminder of the Seljuk-descended Aydınoğulları dynasty, while before that the settlement had been called Ayasuluk continuously since the Turkish conquest²³.