Ephesus was the political, economic and cultural capital of Asia Minor, and the scale is the first thing to grasp: the district governorate puts its population at its height at around 250,000, and calls it the largest ancient city in Anatolia in terms of the area you can actually walk. About two and a half million people visit each year. Its agora was a meeting point for the whole known world — goods coming up from the harbour into the market, sailors and merchants from everywhere bargaining in it — and the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians who filled its streets made it the place where the words kosmos and polites came together into cosmopolitan.
The site is far older than the marble city. Recent archaeological work on Ayasuluk Hill, northwest of Ephesus, where Selçuk Castle now stands, has shown settlement from around 6000 BC, and excavation on the mounds around the city and on the hill itself has found traces of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages and of the Hittites.
What stands today is largely marble: the Library of Celsus, the great theatre, the Temple of Hadrian, the agoras, the baths, the terrace houses, the public latrine, the colonnaded streets and the funerary monuments.
If you enter by the Magnesia Gate you come in turn to the Varius Baths, the State Agora, the odeon, the town hall, the Gate of Herakles, the water palace, the Pollio fountain, the Memmius monument and the Temple of Domitian. Carrying on down Curetes Street you reach the Trajan fountain, the Scholastica baths, the Temple of Hadrian, the terrace houses, the Library of Celsus, the commercial agora, Marble Street, the theatre, the gymnasia, the baths and the twin churches. Along the way, look for the relief of Nike, goddess of victory — a palm in her right hand, a laurel wreath in her left — which the governorate dates to the late Roman period.
One tomb on the route carries a story worth knowing before you reach it. In front of the terrace houses, south of Curetes Street, stands the monument known as the Octagon, and the governorate's account gives it to Arsinoe, the rebellious younger sister of Cleopatra. Cleopatra, Greek by descent, wanted to join the Egyptian and Roman empires and rule the whole world; Arsinoe thought that amounted to handing Egypt over to Rome, and stood against her, so Cleopatra sent her into exile at Ephesus. Arsinoe came here and took refuge in the temple of Artemis, which the priests guarded and which no one could touch in those days. Because she was of the royal line a monument tomb was built for her at Ephesus and she was buried in it. The building sits on a square podium 3.40 metres high and is octagonal, of the Corinthian order, and the first thing a visitor notices is that it was not built in Greek or Roman style: it is close to a miniature of the Pharos of Alexandria, in her own country. Centuries later, excavation in this tomb found the bones of a girl of fifteen or sixteen.
Ephesus is also the home town of a philosopher whose sentences are still in circulation without his name attached. Heraclitus was born and grew up here between 535 and 475 BC, and long before Socrates he turned his questions towards man, society and nature and arrived at the thesis of the unity of opposites. The governorate calls him the ancestor of many philosophical currents that followed for centuries, and credits him with the lines usually taken to be anonymous: that no one bathes twice in the same river, and that the only unchanging thing is change. He offered the books he wrote as votives to the temple of Artemis.
About that relief of Nike, since it is the figure most visitors photograph: the goddess is Victoria in Roman mythology, and she stands for speed and strength as well as victory, being able to run very fast and to fly. The governorate points out that the name of the sportswear brand is no coincidence, and that the shape of the relief makes the connection plain at a glance.
Entry fee
- Single entry to the museum or site · Local
- MüzeKart
- Single entry to the museum or site · Foreign
- €40
Getting there
- Access
- It can be reached by local public transport.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İzmir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (146 mm) and lightest in July (4 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
