Ephesus belongs to Selçuk, a district of İzmir province, and the ruined city is only the centre of what there is to see there. The statues dug out of its streets are in the Ephesus Museum in the town. A single re-erected column marks where the Temple of Artemis stood. Ayasuluk Hill, inside Selçuk, carries the Basilica of St John and the castle. The House of the Virgin Mary is up on Bülbüldağı, past the upper gate of the ancient city. Each has its own guide on this site; this post explains what each one is.
The ancient city
The Selçuk district governorate describes Ephesus as the political, economic and cultural capital of Asia Minor, puts its population at its height at around 250,000, and calls it the largest ancient city in Anatolia by the area a visitor can actually walk. Most of what stands today is marble: the Library of Celsus, the great theatre, the Temple of Hadrian, the agoras and baths and the colonnaded streets. Yet people were here long before the marble. Work on Ayasuluk Hill, just northwest of the ruins, has found settlement from around 6000 BC.
The governorate lays out the route from the Magnesia Gate. Past the Varius Baths and the State Agora you reach the odeon, the Gate of Herakles, the Pollio fountain and the Temple of Domitian. Curetes Street then takes you down by the Trajan fountain and the Scholastica baths to the Temple of Hadrian, the Terrace Houses and the Library of Celsus; beyond them Marble Street leads to the theatre.
Two things on that route repay a pause. South of Curetes Street, in front of the Terrace Houses, is the Octagon, an eight-sided tomb on a square podium. In the governorate's telling it belonged to Arsinoe, Cleopatra's younger sister, who opposed her and was exiled to Ephesus; the tomb looks less Greek or Roman than like a small copy of the Pharos of Alexandria. The other is the relief of Nike, goddess of victory, holding a palm and a laurel wreath. Ephesus was also the home of Heraclitus, to whom the governorate credits the line that no one bathes twice in the same river.
The Terrace Houses
On the slope of Bülbül Dağı, inside the site, are the Terrace Houses: seven Roman houses, very well preserved, where the leading families of Ephesus lived. They were first built in the first century AD over ground that had been a cemetery in the Hellenistic period, and were altered and enlarged until the city was abandoned. Outside they are plain; inside they are showy. Each is arranged around an open courtyard ringed by columns, some rise to two or three storeys, every one has fountains, and each was heated like a bath, the bath serving as the centre and the heat carried through clay pipes to the other rooms.
The Ephesus Museum in Selçuk
The finds from the excavation are kept in the Ephesus Museum, which has an archaeology section and an ethnography section and reopened in November 2014 after a full renewal. Its most famous piece is the statue of Artemis from her temple, a goddess who has absorbed features of Cybele, the mother goddess of Anatolia: a tall headdress shaped like a temple in three tiers, four rows of small spheres below the breast linked to fertility and abundance, and a belt decorated with the bee, the emblem of Ephesus. Look too for the half-reclining young warrior from the Pollio fountain and the marble Marcus Aurelius of the second century AD. It helps to see the museum and the site on the same trip: the young warrior, for one, was found at a fountain you pass on the walk.
Selçuk is on the railway from İzmir: trains run from Basmane Station, or you can ride İZBAN to Tepeköy Station and change there for Selçuk. The ancient city can be reached from the town by local public transport. As for the season: across İzmir province the monthly mean temperature stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October, while July averages 28 °C.
The Temple of Artemis
In Selçuk itself a lone column is nearly all that is left of the sanctuary of Artemis of Ephesus. By the Selçuk municipality's account the ground served the goddess from the end of the 11th century BC at the latest, and temple after temple rose on it, each bigger than the last and all facing west. The first great marble temple, begun shortly before 560 BC with money from Croesus, king of Lydia, was more than 100 metres long and had 106 columns. Herostratos burned it in 356 BC, and its successor was grander still. The column standing today was assembled in 1973 as an experiment, from drums of different columns, and the original columns were about four metres taller.
Ayasuluk Hill: the Basilica of St John and the castle
Ayasuluk Hill rises inside the town and carries three main buildings: the Basilica of St John, the castle and the İsa Bey mosque. Digging here overturned the old view that Ephesus was founded around 1050 BC by settlers from Greece; it showed that the city goes back to the Bronze Age and that this hill was one of its earliest settlements. The basilica, on the south of the hill, stands over the grave of the apostle John, where a monument and then a church were raised in stages. Later the town took the name Ayasuluk and was for a time the capital of the Aydınoğulları principality, and the castle on top has been excavated, with houses, streets, a pavilion and a bath uncovered inside its walls.
The House of the Virgin Mary
Seven kilometres from Selçuk, on Bülbüldağı, is the House of the Virgin Mary, a Catholic shrine. Pilgrims come believing that the apostle John brought Mary to this stone house and that she lived in it until the end of her life; the Catholic Church has made no pronouncement on whether it really was hers. The house was located by following the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a bedridden nun in Germany, which Clemens Brentano wrote down and which were published in Munich in 1852. Outside is a wall where visitors tie their wishes in paper or cloth. Meryemana Nature Park, opened in 2012 around the house, protects its setting of pine forest and olive groves, with walking paths, picnic grounds and viewing points.
Şirince and the rest of Selçuk
Eight kilometres east of Selçuk is Şirince, a hill village that was home to an Orthodox Rum community until 1922. Some 200 houses survive from that time, along with the 19th-century churches of Aya Yani and Aya Dimitri; its market is known for fruit wines. A short distance from Ephesus, the Çamlık Open Air Steam Locomotive Museum keeps engines on a stretch of the İzmir-Aydın line, the oldest railway in Türkiye. In Selçuk, the Selçuk Yaşar Painting Museum, opened in 1985, shows works that won prizes in the DYO painting competitions. For walking and cycling there is the Ephesus–Mimas route, which begins in front of the Temple of Artemis and crosses the İzmir peninsula to Karaburun.
