Şirince sits in the hills some 8 km east of Selçuk, about 10 km by road from the Ephesus Lower Gate1. Until the 1923-24 Greek-Turkish population exchange it was a Greek Orthodox village whose everyday language was Turkish; its Greeks mostly resettled at Nea Efesos near Katerini, and Muslims from villages near Kavala moved in2. Alpan and Danışık, an independent academic source citing Turkish municipal and TÜİK data, confirm that same narrative — a genuine second, scholarly voice for a claim the site had previously sourced only to an encyclopedia3. By their 2023 TÜİK figure the village’s population stood at 4544, close to the encyclopedia’s earlier count.

Turkish-speaking a century before the exchange

The exchange framing is accurate as far as it goes, but it understates how old the village’s Turkish-speaking character actually was. In 1820, more than a century before the exchange, the American missionary Pliny Fisk tried addressing peasants working the Ephesus ruins in Greek and found they understood only Turkish. These were villagers from Kirkinji — Şirince’s own older name — who had already lost the language of Heraclitus and St Paul and kept only vague traditions of their own origins5. When John Turtle Wood arrived to excavate Ephesus decades later, he found the same villagers growing tobacco among the ruins6, a concrete image of a Greek Orthodox community working the ancient site as ordinary farmland, long before anyone called it a heritage destination.

Christian memory kept alive

We saw an illuminated manuscript book which was said to have been discovered in a marvellous manner. It is a liturgy composed from the Gospels of the four Evangelists, and was found (the priests say) in a cave at Ephesus, the man who found it being attracted by a strong light, which emanated from the open book itself!

John Turtle Wood, at Kirkenjee (Şirince), 6 April 1870

Wood records this as local folklore, told to him by the village’s priests, not as an account he could verify himself — a legend about a found gospel book, not a documented discovery. It sits alongside a longer-standing local custom: Orthodox Christians traditionally gather at Şirince each 15 August, the same day a liturgy is held at the House of the Virgin Mary for the Assumption7. Both point the same way — a Greek Orthodox community that, even after its own departure, is remembered through what it kept and told, not only through census figures.

The village today

Şirince was designated an Urban Conservation Site in 1984, and its economy today centres on peaches, wine, olive oil, soap and tarhana, per Alpan and Danışık8. In 2023 UN Tourism named it one of its Best Tourism Villages, a designation Alpan and Danışık note requires a population under 15,000, traditional livelihoods and nomination by a UN Tourism member state9 — criteria the village comfortably meets, at 454 residents and a farming-and-craft economy. Most visitors reach it as a satellite stop on a longer day out, one of a handful of places — alongside Ephesus itself, the Seven Sleepers site, the House of the Virgin Mary, the Basilica of St John and the İsa Bey Mosque — rather than a standalone destination in its own right, according to Alpan and Danışık10.

A painted wooden gallery inside the former Greek church of St John the Baptist, Şirince
Fig. 1 The former Greek Orthodox church of St John the Baptist recalls the village's Greek community before 1923.

What visitors actually find

A 2024 analysis of 166 TripAdvisor reviews posted between 2020 and 2024 concluded that the Best Tourism Village badge is undermined in practice by several recurring problems: mass-produced goods marketed as local craft, an erosion of the village’s authenticity, overcrowding and long waits from overtourism, neglected historic sites with no interpretive signage, fraudulent trading practices, an influx of non-local vendors eroding community cohesion, and infrastructure poorly suited to elderly and disabled visitors11. Of those themes, commodification and the loss of authenticity were both the most prominent and the most varied complaints — 32 distinct expressions each, drawn from 46 and 44 reviews respectively — while complaints about social degradation, though common, were more repetitive, with 14 distinct expressions spread across 45 reviews12. One visitor’s account, tracing a return across 1996, 2006 and 2020, describes houses vanishing behind vendor tents until the village had become, in the phrase used, "a marketplace village"13.

That is not the whole picture. As of 1 December 2024 Şirince held 1,531 TripAdvisor reviews in total, 77% of them rated Excellent or Very Good, per Alpan and Danışık14 — a counterweight that keeps the complaint themes in proportion against overall visitor sentiment, rather than standing in for it.

Best time to visit

Visitor numbers peak from July to September and are lowest in January and February, per Alpan and Danışık15, the same broad pattern as visiting Ephesus itself. A quieter winter visit trades the crowded lanes the 2024 review study describes for a better chance at the village’s older character — the hillside houses, the wine and tarhana producers, and the Orthodox church still standing from before 1923.

A cobbled lane between white houses with dark wooden shutters in Şirince
Fig. 2 A village lane in Şirince.
Sources (17)

Each source is listed once. The numbers link back to the claims it supports; dates show when the source was checked.