Where is Ephesus?

The ancient city lies in the lower valley of the Küçük Menderes, a river the Greeks knew as the Kaystros⁸. Its two hills had ancient names as well: Panayırdağ was Mount Pion, and Bülbüldağ was the ridge that ancient writers called Preon or Lepre Akte⁸. Curetes Street, the spine of the ruins, follows the dip between them downhill as far as the Library of Celsus⁹, and the map of Ephesus plots the whole route from one gate to the other.

Selçuk lies on the northern side, the side of the Lower Gate³. From the town’s railway station to that gate is a walk of about 3.5 km¹⁰.

Ephesus is in Turkey. People look for it in Greece because for most of antiquity it was a Greek-speaking city, and in Greek tradition its founder was Androclus, the Athenian king Codrus’s son, at the head of Ionian settlers¹⁵. Tradition dates that settlement to the 11th or 10th century BC; the oldest Iron Age Greek pottery dug up at the site belongs to the late 11th¹⁶.

Under Rome it was one of the leading cities of the province of Asia. Attalus III of Pergamon bequeathed his kingdom to Rome when he died in 133 BC, and the province took shape in 129 BC¹⁷. That province is the Asia of the New Testament. Revelation’s seven churches, with the Christians of Ephesus addressed first, all lay inside it, not in Asia as the continent is understood today¹⁸.

The ruins keep the ancient name, while the town beside them is Selçuk. Its hill, Ayasuluk, carries a worn-down form of the Greek Hagios Theologos, “the Holy Theologian”, a title of St John; Italian traders made it Altologo, and Turkish speakers Ayasluğ or Ayasuluk¹⁹. The name came from the church raised over the apostle’s traditional grave, the Basilica of St John²⁰.

Under the Turkish Republic, Selçuk was governed from Kuşadası until 1957; that year it was made a district of its own and moved to İzmir province¹.

The Küçük Menderes brought down so much silt that its delta has been pushing the coast westward since about 5000 BC, and every new harbour had to be built beyond the last²¹. The ancient site is now about 5 km inland, and its harbour basin has shrunk to a small marshy lake⁴.

The distance depends on the starting point. The Roman canal ran about 4 km west from the harbour basin, a later Byzantine channel added roughly 3 km more to reach today’s shore, and Ayasuluk hill is about 9 km from the water²². A single figure in a guidebook has simply picked one of those points.

The fight against the silt lasted for centuries. By Strabo’s account, a mole that Attalus II had built to deepen the harbour mouth caught the mud instead²³. Clearance campaigns are recorded from Nero’s reign into the mid-3rd century AD²⁴, and as the delta advanced the Romans dug a long canal west from the basin to keep ships coming in²⁵.

Ephesus was never one settlement on one spot: as the shoreline shifted, the city and its harbours were relocated more than once²¹. In outline, five sites carry the story.

1. c. 6700–2750 BCÇukuriçi Höyük. A Neolithic village, deserted for more than 2,500 years, resettled in the Late Chalcolithic and given up for good around 2750 BC²⁶. In the Neolithic the shore was only some 1.5 km off, near a lagoon²⁷.
2. Late Bronze AgeAyasuluk hill. Many scholars take it to be Apaša, the Arzawan capital of Hittite texts, though the case rests on the name and on Mycenaean finds, with no inscription to confirm it²⁸.
3. 6th century BCDown to the Artemision. According to Strabo, the townspeople came down from the mountainside in Croesus’s time and settled around the temple of Artemis²⁹.
4. Early 3rd century BCThe valley between the hills. Lysimachus rebuilt the city inside new walls on the site where its Hellenistic and Roman remains stand today².
5. Middle AgesBack to Ayasuluk. Settlement drifted to the fortified hill, while parts of the old lower city stayed in use until the 12th century³⁰.

The move under Lysimachus was the turning point in the history of Ephesus. Strabo tells it as a trick with blocked drains and a flooded town³¹; geoarchaeology points to the silting of the old harbour by the Artemision, at a time when the bay between the hills still had deep water³².

The ancient lower city was deserted by the 15th century³³. Life went on at Ayasuluk, and that is why modern Selçuk sits on the medieval site and not on the Roman one.

Several places that belong to the Ephesus story lie outside the fenced ancient city.

• Ayasuluk hill, above Selçuk, carries a Byzantine fortress alongside the Basilica of St John³⁶, and the İsa Bey Mosque of 1375 stands at its foot³⁷.
• The site of the Temple of Artemis falls within the same UNESCO component as Ayasuluk hill¹¹. One column, pieced together from fragments, marks it today³⁸.
• The House of the Virgin Mary is a chapel high on the mountain south of the city, around 380 m above sea level³⁹. Drivers reach it about 5 km after leaving the Upper Gate, or after 11 km from the Lower Gate; no public transport serves it⁴⁰.
• Şirince, a village in the hills, is some 8 km east of Selçuk⁴¹.
• The Mausoleum of Belevi, an early Hellenistic tomb on a massive square podium, is 14 km north-east of Ephesus⁴².

Each of these, and Selçuk’s own past as the medieval heir of Ephesus, has a place in around Ephesus.