The Temple of Artemis stood on flat ground at the edge of Selçuk, in İzmir province, and today one column marks the place. It is easy to walk past, yet the sanctuary it belongs to was holy ground for far longer than the Roman streets of Ephesus nearby. The earliest objects found here are Late Bronze Age, and in the Selçuk municipality's account Artemis was worshipped on this ground from the opening of the Iron Age, the end of the 11th century BC, if not earlier. Ayasuluk Hill and the Ephesus Museum are both within a short distance, and together they make sense of what the single column stands for.
From a wooden shrine to a marble giant
The temple was rebuilt several times, each version larger than the last and each facing west. The first, which no longer shows above ground, was a modest Archaic building of roughly 13.5 by 8.5 metres. Its walls were stone, but its columns were timber standing on stone bases, and a wooden image of the goddess stood inside under a canopy on six columns.
A little before 560 BC construction began on something of another order: a marble temple ringed by a double row of columns, a dipteros, partly paid for by Croesus, king of Lydia. It was more than a hundred metres long and about sixty wide, and its 106 columns were often decorated with reliefs. Only the colonnades had a roof. The walls enclosed an open court, and in that court stood the older shrine and, in the eastern half, the building for the cult statue.
The fire of 356 BC
That marble temple burned in 356 BC, in a fire set by a man named Herostratos. Work on its successor began straight away. The builders kept the main lines of the old design, even its sculpted gutter, but raised everything: the new temple probably had 127 columns, each 18.4 metres tall, on a stepped base 2.7 metres above the previous floor, with an inner stair going down to the old level.
The column you see today
The column now standing on the site went up in 1973 as an experiment in reconstruction, and it is a composite. Its drums come from different columns; it sits on an original base of the 4th-century temple, with a block from the 6th-century building beneath. The temple's own columns rose some four metres higher. Look also for a short stretch of wall on the west side, parts of the court wall, and a fallen column from a later church lying to the south of them.
J. T. Wood located the sanctuary in 1869. D. G. Hogarth and A. Henderson led excavations for the British Museum in 1904–05; later, from 1965, A. Bammer of the Austrian Archaeological Institute exposed the altar of the court and the earliest sacred building.
The goddess in the Ephesus Museum
To see what was worshipped here, go to the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk, which keeps the finds from the excavations and is best known for its statue of Artemis from this sanctuary. She is an Artemis blended with Cybele, the mother goddess Anatolia had honoured since prehistory. Her tall headdress, the polos, takes the form of a temple in three tiers; below her breast, four rows of small spheres stand for fertility and plenty; and the narrow belt at her waist carries the bee, the emblem of Ephesus. Lions, rams, deer, griffins and bees fill the panels of her dress. The museum reopened in November 2014 after a full renewal.
Ayasuluk Hill above the temple
From the temple you can see Ayasuluk Hill, which holds the Basilica of St John, the castle and the İsa Bey Mosque. Digging here and at nearby Çukuriçi Höyük pushed the story of Ephesus back: the old view put the founding of Ephesus at about 1050 BC, but Ayasuluk turns out to be one of its first settlements, going back to the Early Bronze Age. Many now identify the hill with Apasas, the capital of the Arzawa kingdom, though that is treated as close to certain rather than proven.
The town took the name Ayasuluk after it passed to Turkish rule in the fourteenth century and served for a while as the capital of the Aydınoğulları principality. The temple, the museum and the hill can all be seen on foot in Selçuk, and the ruins of Ephesus lie just outside the town.
