Ephesus, Turkey: Once by the Sea, Now Inland, Its Splendour Remains

Few ancient cities possess the scale, beauty, and extraordinary depth of history found at Ephesus. Once standing beside a magnificent natural harbour on the Aegean coast of western Anatolia, the city grew from ancient Anatolian settlements and an Ionian Greek colony into one of the great cultural, religious, and commercial centres of the Mediterranean world.

Today the sea lies kilometres away, beyond a broad fertile plain created by centuries of sediment carried down by the Kaystros River. Yet among the marble streets, temples, fountains, theatres and public buildings of Ephesus, it is still possible to imagine a city looking west towards the Aegean, its harbour crowded with merchant vessels arriving from across the ancient world.

The story of Ephesus is one of continual transformation. It was Anatolian and Greek, Hellenistic and Roman, Pagan and Christian. It prospered because of the sea, repeatedly adapted as its coastline changed, and eventually watched its harbour retreat into the distance. Across thousands of years, Ephesus effectively followed the sea, rebuilding and relocating as geography, empire and faith reshaped its world.

Before the Greeks

The history of Ephesus began long before the arrival of Greek settlers.

Evidence of human habitation at nearby Cukurici Hoyuk reaches back to the seventh millennium BCE. This prehistoric community developed into an important centre of exchange between the Aegean and central Anatolia before being abandoned during the Early Bronze Age.

Settlement later shifted towards Ayasuluk Hill, beside modern Selcuk. During the second millennium BCE, an important town emerged here, probably the place known as Apasa in Hittite records. The similarity between the names Apasa and Ephesus has long attracted scholarly interest, although the identification cannot be regarded as certain.

The religious landscape was ancient as well. By the second millennium BCE, a sanctuary associated with an Anatolian female divinity had developed in the region. Across the centuries, this local tradition would merge with the Greek worship of Artemis and eventually create one of the most celebrated religious centres of antiquity.

The Coming of the Ionians

From around 1000 BCE, groups of Greeks began migrating across the Aegean to the western coast of Anatolia. This movement, traditionally known as the Ionian migration, was not a single invasion or founding event. It took place gradually as Greek-speaking communities established settlements among populations already inhabiting the fertile valleys, hills, and coastal plains of western Anatolia.

Ephesus became one of the most important of these Ionian settlements.

Ancient Greek tradition gave the city a heroic founder, Androclus, son of the legendary Athenian king Codrus. Like many ancient foundation stories, the tale lies somewhere between mythology, cultural memory, and distant history.

According to legend, Androclus consulted an oracle before departing from Greece and was told that a fish and a wild boar would reveal the site where his new city should be founded. After reaching the Anatolian coast, the settlers began cooking fish. One supposedly leapt from the fire, carrying embers into nearby vegetation. A wild boar, startled by the flames, fled from the undergrowth.

Androclus pursued and killed the animal and, recognising the fulfilment of the prophecy, established his settlement where the boar fell.

The story remained embedded in the memory of Ephesus for centuries. Androclus was honoured as the city’s founding hero and later appeared in Ephesian art and coinage.

Behind the legend was a far more complex meeting of peoples.

The Greek traveller Pausanias, writing many centuries later, recorded that the Leleges and Lydians occupied the region when Androclus and the Ionians arrived. According to his account, the newcomers expelled some of these inhabitants from the upper settlement, while those living around the ancient sanctuary reached an agreement with the Ionians and remained.

The geographer Strabo similarly described Carians and Leleges inhabiting Ephesus before the Greek settlement. He placed the early Ionian community around an Athena sanctuary and a spring called Hypelaeus, extending towards the slopes of Mount Coressus.

The ancient traditions are significant because they suggest Greek Ephesus did not simply replace an earlier culture. Instead, newcomers and existing Anatolian communities gradually formed a new society.

Modern archaeology reinforces the complexity of this picture. The precise location and extent of the earliest Greek settlements are still being investigated. Remains from the early Greek period have been discovered beneath the later commercial agora and on Panayirdag, while another settlement existed near the sanctuary of Artemis.

Much of early Ephesus remains difficult to uncover because ancient occupation levels lie beneath later buildings, metres of river sediment, or the modern water table. The magnificent Hellenistic and Roman ruins visible today therefore conceal an earlier city whose form is only slowly being reconstructed.

A Greek City Between the Aegean and Anatolia

The position of Ephesus was exceptional.

The settlement stood near the mouth of the Kaystros River, facing the Aegean and commanding a natural route into the Anatolian interior. Agricultural produce, timber, metals and other resources could be transported through the river valley, while ships connected Ephesus with the islands of the Aegean, mainland Greece and the wider Mediterranean.

Geography helped create the city’s prosperity. Ironically, the same river that enriched Ephesus would ultimately threaten its existence by carrying immense quantities of sediment towards the coast.

As the Greek settlement developed, Ephesus became one of the principal cities of Ionia, the remarkable chain of Greek communities extending along the central western Anatolian coast and neighbouring islands.

Alongside cities such as Miletus, Priene, Colophon, Teos and Phocaea, Ephesus participated in the wider Ionian cultural world. These communities shared language, religious traditions, and political institutions, while maintaining their own fiercely independent identities.

Yet Ephesus remained different.

Its character emerged from the meeting of the Aegean and Anatolia, and nowhere was this more clear than in the worship of its great goddess.

Artemis of Ephesus

The Greeks identified the ancient female divinity worshipped in the region with their own goddess Artemis, but the resulting Artemis Ephesia was unlike the youthful huntress familiar from much of Greek mythology.

At Ephesus she became an imposing goddess of fertility, abundance, protection and the forces of nature, preserving elements of much older Anatolian religious traditions. Her distinctive image, covered with symbols, animals, and rows of rounded forms associated with fertility and abundance, became instantly recognisable throughout the ancient world.

The merging of the Greek Artemis with an older Anatolian goddess is perhaps the clearest expression of the cultural fusion from which Ephesus emerged.

Her sanctuary became the spiritual heart of the city.

By the seventh century BCE, a monumental temple already stood there. During the sixth century BCE, it was replaced by a far larger marble sanctuary, constructed with the assistance of Croesus, king of Lydia, whose wealth became legendary throughout the Greek world.

The Artemision was not simply a temple. It became a place of pilgrimage, commerce, wealth, and political influence. Travellers arrived from distant parts of the Mediterranean to honour the Ephesian goddess, while rulers and wealthy individuals made valuable offerings to her sanctuary.

Religious devotion and commercial prosperity became inseparable from the identity of Ephesus.

Lydia, Persia, and the Greek World

The prosperity of Ephesus inevitably brought it into contact with the great powers of Anatolia.

During the sixth century BCE, the expanding Kingdom of Lydia, centred on Sardis, established authority over the Ionian cities. King Croesus attacked and subdued Ephesus, although his relationship with the city later became one of patronage as well as political control. His contribution to the construction of the great Temple of Artemis demonstrated the enormous prestige already attached to the sanctuary.

When Croesus was defeated by Cyrus the Great in the mid-sixth century BCE, Lydia and the Greek cities of western Anatolia passed under the authority of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Ephesus consequently found itself between two worlds, culturally Greek yet politically connected to the enormous Persian Empire stretching eastwards across Asia.

During the Ionian Revolt, which began in 499 BCE, western Anatolia became a battleground between rebellious Greek cities and Persian authority. In 498 BCE, after Ionian and allied Greek forces attacked and burned much of Sardis, Persian troops pursued the retreating army and defeated it near Ephesus.

Throughout the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, Ephesus experienced changing political fortunes as Persian power, Athenian influence, and later Spartan intervention competed for control of the Ionian coast.

Yet through these upheavals, the city remained prosperous and culturally vibrant.

Heraclitus and the Mind of Ionia

It was within this extraordinary environment that Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of the most enigmatic philosophers of the ancient Greek world, was born around the late sixth century BCE.

Heraclitus contemplated a universe governed by movement, opposition, and continual transformation. Although later tradition compressed aspects of his thought into the familiar idea that everything flows, his surviving fragments reveal a thinker fascinated by the hidden order beneath constant change.

There is something remarkably pertinent about Heraclitus emerging from Ephesus.

Few cities of antiquity experienced change more profoundly. Ephesus would repeatedly alter its position, rulers, architecture, religion, and relationship with the sea, yet preserve a continuous identity stretching across thousands of years.

A Wonder of the Ancient World

In 356 BCE, the great Temple of Artemis was destroyed by fire, traditionally blamed on a man seeking immortality through the notoriety of his crime.

Ancient legend added another extraordinary detail: the temple supposedly burned on the same night that Alexander the Great was born.

The Ephesians began rebuilding the sanctuary on an even more magnificent scale. The new Artemision became one of the greatest architectural achievements of the ancient Greek world, celebrated for its enormous dimensions, marble columns, sculptural decoration, and lavish wealth.

It was this later temple that became immortalised as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Ancient writers struggled to convey its splendour. Pausanias later observed that the sanctuary’s extraordinary fame came from its antiquity, its vast size, the eminence of Ephesus and the renown of the goddess herself.

Almost nothing of this celebrated wonder survives above ground today. A single reconstructed column rises from the marshy landscape near Selcuk, surrounded by scattered fragments.

Perhaps nowhere in Ephesus is the contrast between ancient fame and modern survival more striking. A sanctuary that once drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean has been reduced to traces in the earth, leaving imagination to restore its vanished magnificence.

Alexander the Great

In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great entered western Anatolia during his campaign against the Persian Empire.

Ephesus came under his authority as Persian control of the Ionian coast collapsed.

According to ancient tradition, Alexander visited the sanctuary of Artemis while the new temple was still under construction and offered to finance its completion. The Ephesians diplomatically declined, supposedly replying that it would not be appropriate for one God to build a temple for another.

Whether the exchange occurred precisely as later writers recorded it, the story reveals both the immense prestige of the Artemision and the political sensitivity of the Ephesians.

Alexander’s conquest restored the city to the broader Greek political world, but his sudden death in 323 BCE plunged his empire into decades of struggle among his generals.

One of those successors would transform Ephesus completely.

Lysimachus and the Birth of a New City

Around 300 BCE, Lysimachus, one of Alexander’s successors, created a new Ephesus between the hills of Panayirdag and Bulbuldag.

The decision was partly geographical. The coastline and harbour were already being affected by sediment from the Kaystros River, while the scattered older settlements lacked the urban organisation required for a major Hellenistic city.

Lysimachus ordered the construction of an extensive fortification wall and established a planned city laid out according to the principles of Hellenistic urban design. Residents from surrounding settlements were moved into the new city.

Strabo preserves a colourful story claiming that the inhabitants initially resisted relocation, prompting Lysimachus to obstruct the drainage system during heavy rain until flooding persuaded them to move. Whether literally true or embellished with time, the story reflects the scale of the transformation.

Lysimachus briefly renamed the city Arsinoeia after his wife Arsinoe, but the ancient name of Ephesus proved far more enduring.

This new Hellenistic Ephesus formed the foundation of the monumental city seen today.

Among the structures originating during this period was the Great Theatre, built into the slope of Panayirdag. Although later transformed and dramatically enlarged under Roman rule, its origins belong to the Greek city of Lysimachus.

The physical centre of Ephesus had changed once again, following both political ambition and the slowly moving sea.

A Metropolis of Roman Asia

After a further period of changing Hellenistic rulers, Ephesus eventually passed into Roman hands.

Following the incorporation of the former Kingdom of Pergamon into Roman territory from 133 BCE, Ephesus became the leading city of the Roman province of Asia and developed into one of the principal administrative and commercial centres of the eastern Mediterranean.

Its harbour was the foundation of its prosperity.

Merchant vessels brought goods and people from across the Mediterranean, while major roads connected the port with the interior of Anatolia. Grain, wine, olive oil, textiles, ceramics, timber, and luxury goods passed through its marketplaces.

By the first and second centuries CE, Ephesus had become one of the great cities of the Roman world. Its precise population cannot be established, and the figure of 400,000 sometimes quoted for the city is almost certainly too high. Estimates of around 200,000 inhabitants are often proposed, although ancient urban populations remain difficult to calculate with certainty.

Whatever the precise number, the scale of the surviving city leaves no doubt that Ephesus was an immense and prosperous metropolis.

Roman Ephesus was adorned with monumental gateways, temples, bath complexes, fountains, gymnasia, marketplaces, and public buildings. Aqueducts supplied fresh water, while paved streets linked the city’s political, religious, and commercial districts.

The magnificent Curetes Street descended through the heart of the city, lined with fountains, monuments, temples, and richly ornamented buildings. Its marble paving and surviving colonnades still create one of the most atmospheric urban spaces in the ancient Mediterranean.

Nearby, the remarkable Terrace Houses reveal the private world of the Ephesian elite. Their mosaics, frescoes, marble wall coverings, courtyards, and sophisticated domestic arrangements demonstrate the extraordinary wealth enjoyed by some of the city’s inhabitants.

Ephesus does not feel like an isolated collection of ruins. Streets still connect houses, fountains, marketplaces, temples, and civic buildings, allowing the organisation of the ancient city to remain remarkably clear.

The Great Theatre

Among the most imposing monuments of Ephesus is the Great Theatre, rising dramatically against the western slope of Panayirdag, ancient Mount Pion.

The theatre originated during the Hellenistic period, probably in the third century BCE, but was repeatedly enlarged and transformed under Roman rule.

At its greatest extent, it could accommodate around 22,000 spectators, making it one of the largest theatres of antiquity.

The theatre was used for drama, public ceremonies and political gatherings, while during the Roman period it also hosted gladiatorial combat and animal spectacles.

From its upper tiers, the ancient audience could once look westwards towards the harbour and the Aegean beyond.

The theatre also became associated with one of the most famous episodes in the early Christian history of Ephesus.

According to the Acts of the Apostles, the preaching of Saint Paul threatened the livelihood of craftsmen whose businesses depended upon the cult of Artemis. A silversmith named Demetrius stirred opposition against Paul, arguing that the new teachings endangered both their trade and the honour of the goddess.

An angry crowd gathered inside the Great Theatre and acclaimed Artemis.

Paul wanted to enter the theatre and address the gathering, but his companions and sympathetic officials prevented him from doing so. Therefore, although the theatre is closely associated with Paul, the frequently repeated claim that he actually preached there is not supported by the biblical account.

The incident nevertheless powerfully symbolises a world in transition, with the ancient cult of Artemis confronted by a new faith that would eventually transform Ephesus itself.

The Library of Celsus

If the Great Theatre conveys the scale of Ephesus, the Library of Celsus expresses its elegance.

Its reconstructed two-storey marble facade has become the defining image of the ancient city.

Constructed during the early second century CE, the library was built by Gaius Julius Aquila in honour of his father, Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, a distinguished Roman senator, consul, and former governor of the province of Asia.

The building performed two functions, serving both as a public library and as a monumental memorial to Celsus.

Behind the main hall, beneath the building, lies the burial chamber containing his great marble sarcophagus. Burial within the centre of a Roman city was highly unusual, emphasising the status and prestige of Celsus and his family.

The library could accommodate approximately 10,000 papyrus scrolls, arranged in niches on two levels. Architectural passages separated the inner walls from the exterior masonry, helping protect the collection from the effects of moisture.

Four statues decorated niches in the facade and personified qualities associated with Celsus: Sophia, wisdom; Arete, virtue; Episteme, knowledge; and Ennoia, intellect.

The figures seen at the library today are replacements. The surviving originals are held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The facade itself is also partly a modern archaeological reconstruction. Austrian archaeologists painstakingly reassembled it between 1970 and 1978, using surviving ancient architectural elements together with carefully integrated modern materials.

The result allows the grace and theatricality of Roman Ephesian architecture to be experienced once more.

From Artemis to Christianity

For centuries, Ephesus had been defined by the worship of Artemis, yet during the Roman period it also became one of the most important centres of early Christianity.

Saint Paul spent several years in the city during the first century CE, preaching and helping establish its Christian community. Later Christian tradition associated Ephesus with Saint John the Evangelist. Tradition also believes the Virgin Mary spent her final years nearby at Mount Koressos, though history cannot confirm this.

The city’s Christian importance continued to grow. The Church of Mary became one of its major religious buildings, and in 431 CE Ephesus hosted the influential Council of Ephesus, which played a significant role in shaping early Christian doctrine.

On nearby Ayasuluk Hill, the later Basilica of Saint John became an important pilgrimage destination.

The transformation was profound. For centuries pilgrims had come to Ephesus to honour Artemis; now Christians arrived to venerate figures of their own faith. The gods had changed, yet Ephesus remained a city of pilgrimage.

When the Sea Withdrew

The decline of Ephesus was neither sudden nor caused by a single disaster.

Earthquakes, political instability, invasions, and economic changes all affected the city, particularly during the third century CE. Yet Ephesus recovered and experienced another period of prosperity during Late Antiquity.

The more persistent threat came from the landscape itself.

For centuries the Kaystros River had carried sediment down from the Anatolian interior and deposited it across the estuary. The coastline slowly moved westwards, while the city’s harbour became increasingly difficult to maintain.

The Ephesians repeatedly responded by modifying harbour installations and channels and, at different stages of the city’s long history, relocating their settlements closer to usable anchorages.

The city literally followed its harbour.

Eventually, however, human engineering could no longer overcome the changing landscape.

The Aegean retreated farther into the distance, depriving Ephesus of the maritime connection that had been the foundation of its wealth for centuries.

Even then the city did not simply disappear.

During the Byzantine period its inhabited area gradually contracted. From around the seventh century, settlement increasingly concentrated around the former harbour district and eventually shifted towards Ayasuluk Hill, where the Basilica of Saint John became the focus of a new community.

Parts of the ancient city remained inhabited for centuries, while medieval Ayasuluk eventually developed above and beside the remnants of the older world.

A City That Endures

Ephesus was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015, recognised as an exceptional testimony to the Hellenistic, Roman Imperial and early Christian worlds and to the extraordinary relationship between human settlement and a continually changing landscape.

What survives today is remarkable.

The Great Theatre still climbs the hillside. Curetes Street descends between temples, fountains, and ancient houses. Mosaics and frescoes remain within the Terrace Houses. The magnificent facade of the Library of Celsus once again rises above its marble staircase.

Yet perhaps the most haunting presence at Ephesus is something that can no longer be seen.

The sea.

The ancient road leading west from the Great Theatre towards the harbour now stretches across a landscape of reeds and fields. Ships no longer approach the city, and the Aegean lies far beyond the ruins.

For thousands of years, Ephesus adapted to changing kingdoms, empires, religions, and coastlines. Greeks arrived from across the Aegean and mingled with the older cultures of Anatolia. Artemis rose above one of the wonders of the ancient world. Alexander passed through its streets. Lysimachus moved the city. Rome transformed it into a great metropolis. Christianity gave its ancient places new meaning.

And through every transformation, the city followed the changing shore.

Today the sea has gone, the sanctuary of Artemis lies almost vanished, and the voices that once filled the theatre have fallen silent. Yet among the marble streets of Ephesus, the splendour of that lost world still rises from the earth.

View a selection of images of Ephesus

© Steven Sklifas. Words and photographs. All rights reserved.