Curetes Street

Origins: the street the grid couldn’t touch

Beneath the street’s own paving, excavators found an over-life-size marble portrait head of Lysimachos, stylistically dated to the 280s BC — a striking find in itself, buried under the road named, centuries later, for a different set of priests entirely².

Three tombs at the foot of the street

Guides usually name two tombs at the lower end of Curetes Street — the Octagon and the Heroon — but a third stood between them, per Elliger: a heroon-style grave of an unidentified young woman, about twenty years old, from the Augustan era¹¹. Late in antiquity, the western of the three tombs, the Heroon, was converted into a large fountain basin, its screens carved with Christian symbols — probably driven, Elliger suggests, in a still-densely-populated district, by a real crisis in the water supply rather than by indifference to the dead¹².

Whether the Heroon really is the Tomb of Androklos, the city’s legendary founder, is unresolved, and the two candidate sites contradict each other directly. John Turtle Wood identified a monument near the Magnesian Gate as Androklos’s tomb in 1869. Knibbe and Thür consider that identification unlikely, since Pausanias’s own route — past the Olympieion, then Androklos’s tomb, then the Magnesian Gate — does not match where Wood actually found his monument; Thür proposes instead that the Heroon here, on Curetes Street itself, is the real tomb¹³. Thür’s argument for an early date rests on construction technique: the Heroon’s core uses plain ashlar masonry rather than the opus caementicium introduced to Asia Minor around 50 BC and used in the neighbouring Octagon, and a drainage channel here predates the Octagon (41 BC) but postdates the Heroon itself — placing the Heroon before the mid-1st century BC¹⁴. Neither candidate is settled; readers should treat the Androklos identification, on either site, as an argument rather than a fact.

A 1988 excavation of a nearby sarcophagus found three people inside: a marble portrait head of an imperial priest in his sixties, the bones of a three- or four-year-old boy, and a second man, also in his sixties, with arthritis. Thür has argued that the priest is Aristion, reburied here after originally lying near the so-called Octagon of "Arsinoe IV"¹⁵.

The Octagon’s imperial edicts

The Octagon’s own base carries a cluster of Late Roman imperial texts, independently reported across three separate works. A joint rescript of the emperors Valentinian, Valens and Gratian, dated AD 371, orders an inquiry into embezzled funds meant to rebuild the city after earthquakes in 358 and around 365, and promises to free Ephesus from what it calls the "ugly dust of old ruins"¹⁶. A separate letter calls Ephesus outright “Asiae caput” — capital of Asia — recording a grant of 100 iuga of land plus the Leuce estate as a pilot wall-repair scheme, alongside a rare hard figure for the whole province’s tax base: 6,736.5 prime iuga, plus 700 defective iuga¹⁶.

Late antique street life, and a brothel that may not have been one

By the 4th and 5th centuries the street had become a working district as much as a ceremonial one. Metalworkers operated from the tabernae behind the Fountain of Trajan and at shop doorways from the 5th to the 7th centuries, and shopfronts in the colonnade were given marble veneer in the 5th and 6th¹⁷. Ladstätter and Magdalino note that Curetes Street is probably Ephesus’s single richest case of spolia reuse: honorific statues set between the colonnade’s columns frequently do not belong with the inscribed bases they now stand on, so a base’s inscription often does not actually name the statue above it — a caution worth keeping in mind at any point along the street¹⁸.

One building near the street’s lower end carries a genuine, unresolved dispute over what it was. Foss reports that a house here was formerly wrongly identified as a brothel, and argues it was in fact an ordinary house, with an atrium, dining rooms, a peristyle court and two mosaics. Rogers reports the opposite: citing D. Knibbe’s rebuttal of the original excavators’ scepticism, he maintains the brothel reading of the building’s paidiskeion inscription¹⁹. Neither position has displaced the other.

Further down, chariot-racing loyalties left their own mark, Foss notes: inscriptions near the Theatre and on the main street name the Blues and the Greens, cut during the bitter early-7th-century rivalry between the two factions, tied respectively to the emperor Phocas and his successor Heraclius²⁰. By the 7th and 8th centuries the street’s grander life was over. A large storehouse-like building, about 60 by 30 m, was built over the rubble of the street’s once-luxurious late-antique houses, with small terraced houses filling in the rest — and, Foss adds, the coin evidence for the district essentially stops with Heraclius’s reign, with only two coins, of Constantine V and Constantine X, representing the whole of the rest of the Byzantine period there²¹.

Older scholarship had also assumed the wrong god for one of the street’s festivals. A statue group dedicated to Dionysos, dated AD 92–93, stood at the crossroads of Curetes Street and Marble Street, marking the site of the katagogia festival. Ramsay and other older scholars had assumed the festival belonged to Artemis; a Priene inscription, cited by Strelan, confirms it belonged to Dionysos instead²². Church tradition places the bishop Timothy’s fatal confrontation with a crowd of Dionysos’s revellers, who had come down from Bülbüldağ, at the same crossroads, “in the middle of the Embolos” itself, with his burial afterward on Mount Pion²³, part of the wider story told on Sacred Ephesus.

Walking Curetes Street today means walking through all of this at once: a route older than the city’s own street plan, a name that has been mistranslated for decades, a fountain whose statues nobody has fully agreed on, and a house whose function two respected scholars still read in opposite ways. Little of it is settled, and that is closer to how the street’s own history actually reads than a single confident description would be.