Harbour Street

Whose baths? A correction

The great bath-gymnasium complex beside Harbour Street has long carried the name “Baths of Constantine,” a label the site’s own text has previously called unreliable. That caution was right, but the attribution itself is not unresolved any longer: three independent sources — Foss, Hanslmayr’s 2016 excavation report and Steskal & La Torre’s 2008 report — agree that the late-antique patron was Constantius II, acting through the proconsul Lucius Caelius Montius, and that the complex was known in Late Antiquity as the Thermae Constantianae⁷. What was long thought is the vague “Constantine” label; what is now argued, on three independent readings of the same evidence, is a specific emperor and a specific official who built in his name. The correction is offered here as an explained change, not a silent swap.

The baths themselves were large by any Ephesian standard: about 70,000 m² on one source’s figure, part of an overall complex — including the Portico of Verulanus, itself over 200 m square and larger than any comparable portico in the city — that together covered roughly 500 by 300 m, the biggest single footprint of public building anywhere in Ephesus⁸.

Keeping the harbour open

A working harbour needed constant upkeep, and Ephesus’s civic and Roman authorities record that upkeep in detail. Tacitus records that in AD 66 the proconsul Barea Soranus had the harbour basin cleaned — an act of civic munificence that only increased the emperor Nero’s hostility toward him, and Soranus was later forced to suicide⁹. A little over eighty years later, proconsul L. Antonius Albus’s edict of AD 146/47 (IvE 23, now displayed in the Ephesus Museum at Selçuk) specifically forbids timber importers from stacking wood on the quay, because the weight damages the piers, and bans stone-sawers from silting the channel with grit — both known from Rogers’s discussion and from Wankel’s original epigraphic edition of the text¹⁰. An undated decree set up at the harbour also prohibited people from bearing arms there; Foss suggests it may date to the reign of Valens, when a similar ban was decreed empire-wide¹¹.

Ephesus’s need to keep dredging was not a passing problem. Foss traces how the original harbour near the Artemision silted first, prompting Lysimachus’s move of the city to begin with; the same problem recurred at the new site, and kept recurring, requiring constant dredging and punitive measures from the reign of Attalus II through into the early 3rd century AD¹². Later benefaction is less certain: an early-3rd-century benefactor, M. Fulvius Publicianus Nikephoros, is named by Rogers as having subsidised the harbour’s southern gate specifically, though whether this was a repair of an already-standing gate or the gate’s actual construction date remains an open question this page has not been able to resolve¹³. There is also an unresolved tension in the record around the mid-3rd century: an earthquake, probably around AD 262, is said by Rogers to have destroyed the Serapeion precinct and collapsed the lower agora complex, after which no benefactor was able to resume the periodic dredging, so the harbour became progressively unusable for ship traffic¹⁴.

A harbour with a long afterlife

The popular version of this story ends abruptly: the harbour silted up in antiquity, full stop, with the story sometimes tied to a single event, the AD 726 eruption of Santorini, on the evidence of pumice found in beach ridges nearby. That single-event picture does not hold up. Foss himself already disputed the 726 dating on textual grounds, and the fuller evidence assembled since settles the point further: amphora finds show intensive harbour activity in the Roman basin continuing to the early 7th century, a harbour at Çanakgöl Tepe operated through the rest of Late Antiquity, and a harbour at Pamucak operated from at least the 11th century — with supporting tobacco-pipe evidence — into the 17th. The last Ottoman documentary mention of “the harbour of Ayasoluk” comes as late as 1622–1623¹⁶. Read together, these facts describe a working harbour of some kind, relocating between three different sites, for roughly a millennium after the classical harbour first silted — not a single sharp ending.

The transition was gradual rather than a single collapse. Byzantine walls of the 7th–8th century still reached the harbour’s edge, with a protective tower, showing it still functioned then, Foss notes¹⁷. By the early 9th century, though, it no longer served the Byzantine fleet, which sailed from Phygela instead — and by the 10th century, silting had made the old harbour unusable for the fleet altogether: both great Byzantine expeditions to reconquer Crete, the failed attempt of 903 and the victorious one of 961, sailed from Phygela rather than Ephesus, he adds¹⁸.

Even before that decline, large vessels could not always reach the basin directly. Ladstätter and Magdalino write that at the end of the 2nd century AD, Titus Flavius Damianus built offshore anchorages for large ships, whose cargo and passengers were then transferred onto smaller barques and brought in via the canal to the Roman harbour basin — the same transfer practice Cyril of Alexandria is said to have used on his own arrival for the Council of Ephesus in AD 431¹⁹. That council, they note, is reported to have favoured Ephesus partly for its communications, reachable, as the record puts it, "by land and by sea"²⁰. Long after, around 1106, the Russian pilgrim Abbot Daniel, sailing from Chios to Ephesus on his way to Jerusalem, recorded visiting a harbour among the city’s pilgrim attractions, naming it, in Russian, for the spot where St John the Evangelist was said to have been miraculously washed ashore²¹ — a working port, still, four centuries after the classical harbour’s supposed single end.

Wood, excavating in the 1860s and 70s, found the classical harbour already reduced to a marsh of bullrushes tracing its old outline — a 19th-century snapshot of the very silting this page describes, taken centuries after the working port had already moved elsewhere.