Terrace Houses of Ephesus: Inside Roman Terrace House 2

The Terrace Houses are the homes of well-off Ephesians, stepped up the slope of Bülbüldağ above Curetes Street. The block open to visitors, Terrace House 2, covers about 4,000 m² and is among the best-preserved Roman houses in the eastern Mediterranean¹. It has been under a protective roof since 1999/2000², and it is sold as a separate ticket from the main site³.

At a glance

Block	Terrace House 2 (Hanghaus 2), about 4,000 m²¹
Homes	seven, originally six⁴
First built	Augustan–Tiberian period⁵
Destroyed	earthquake, third quarter of the 3rd century AD⁶
Excavated	1960s to 1980s⁷
Roofed	1999/2000²
World Heritage	named in UNESCO’s criterion (iii)⁸

The block and its seven houses

Each terrace house is an insula, a whole city block of housing, cut into the hillside above Curetes Street¹. Terrace House 2 is the one shown to visitors⁵. Its neighbour, Terrace House 1, is a similar block in poorer condition, published separately by C. Lang-Auinger in 1996 and 2003⁹.

Inside Terrace House 2 are seven residential units, although the block started out with six. Every one of them is a peristyle house, arranged round a colonnaded courtyard, and each climbs across three terraces of the slope⁴. Descriptions that give six homes are describing the first layout, not the last⁴.

Curetes Street below is the street of the Temple of Hadrian¹⁰, and it runs downhill to the Library of Celsus¹¹.

Marble-lined walls and rooms in the Terrace Houses beneath the protective roof — Fig. 1 Rooms beneath the Terrace Houses shelter.

Building and destruction

The first houses went up in the Augustan–Tiberian period, between the late 1st century BC and the early 1st century AD, over layers left by late Hellenistic occupation. A coin in the construction fill shows the work cannot be earlier than 25 BC⁵. The houses did not stay as first built. Unit 6, for example, was enlarged in a second building phase around AD 120 and a third around 150¹².

An earthquake in the third quarter of the 3rd century AD brought the block down⁶. That quarter-century is the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s dating for the destruction; the year 262, taken from the Historia Augusta, is often attached to the disaster, but it is a traditional date rather than one the archaeology fixes¹³. The houses were never rebuilt as grand residences, and the disasters of that century ended the city’s imperial heyday¹⁴, a turning point in the history of Ephesus. Parts of the ruin were later taken over for workshops and mills⁶.

Fragments of blue-veined marble veneer laid out for reassembly, Terrace Houses — Fig. 2 Marble veneer fragments laid out for reassembly.

Who lived in the Terrace Houses?

The best-documented household is unit 6. It belonged to Gaius Flavius Furius Aptus, a priest of Dionysus, who added marble banqueting halls to it in the 2nd century and had doors connecting his house to units 4 and 7¹².

His marble-clad hall measures about 178 m²¹⁵. That is almost exactly the floor area given for the reading hall of the Library of Celsus¹⁶: a private dining room on the scale of the city’s great public library.

Reassembled green-veined marble wall panels with visible joins and missing pieces — Fig. 3 Reassembled marble wall cladding from the Terrace Houses.

Wall paintings, mosaics and marble

Nowhere in the Roman East has a larger group of 2nd- and 3rd-century wall paintings survived than in Terrace House 2¹⁷. The floors add about a hundred mosaics¹⁷.

Unit 2 has mosaics made of glass, and marble revetment covers the walls extensively across the complex¹⁷. In unit 6 the banqueting halls Furius Aptus added were marble halls¹², and the one of about 178 m² is clad in the stone¹⁵.

Objects found in the houses have a section of their own in the Ephesus Museum at Selçuk¹⁸.

Fig. 4 Wall painting with red panels, garlands and a small winged figure, Terrace Houses. Archive photograph (2015).

Graffiti: prices, drawings and verse

Scratched into the walls are drawings, short poems and lists of everyday prices¹⁹. Some of the price lists are household accounts¹⁹. They survived under the earthquake debris, which makes them a record of daily life in the block at the moment it came down¹⁹.

Excavation, the roof and the publications

Excavation began in the 1960s under Hermann Vetters and carried on into the 1980s⁷. The protective roof was built in 1999/2000 under the excavation director Friedrich Krinzinger, and visitors have been able to walk through the houses ever since².

When Ephesus joined the World Heritage List in 2015²⁰, Terrace House 2 was one of just four monuments in the ancient city that UNESCO picked out by name for criterion (iii)⁸.

In print the houses have a shelf of their own. The Austrian series Forschungen in Ephesos gives ten volumes to the terrace houses, among them monographs on unit 4 (2005), units 1 and 2 (2010), unit 6 (2014) and unit 7 (2016), and further volumes on the ivories (2003), the wall painting by V. M. Strocka and the mosaics by W. Jobst. A “twelve-volume” publication is sometimes mentioned, but the list as it stands does not bear that out²¹.

Mosaic-floored rooms viewed from above under the Terrace Houses protective roof — Fig. 5 Excavated rooms beneath the protective roof.

Do the Terrace Houses need a separate ticket?

The ministry prices the Terrace Houses separately from the main archaeological site, and has already published the prices that take effect on 1 April 2027²². Combined tickets for the site and the Terrace Houses are also sold³, and the audio guide included in foreign visitors’ tickets covers the houses as well²³.

The Turkish MüzeKart does not give free entry here²⁴. The ministry’s MuseumPass pages mark the Terrace Houses on their maps of included sites, although a map is not a formal statement of what the pass covers²⁵.

Current prices, opening hours and the 2027 changes are kept, dated, on tickets and opening hours, and the route through the rest of the site starts from the ancient city.