Selcuk: The Afterlife of Ephesus

Selcuk inherited the afterlife of Ephesus, and to walk it is to trace how a great classical city drained away and climbed a hill to survive. Down on the plain lies the marble metropolis of Ephesus, once one of the largest cities of the Roman east, with a council house, terraced mansions, a monumental library, and a theatre for twenty-five thousand. Above it rises Ayasuluk hill, crowned by a Byzantine fortress and the basilica of Saint John. In a marshy field between them stands a single re-erected column, all that is left of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The through-line that unites both of our Selcuk (Ephesus) walking tours is displacement: the water left, the city moved uphill, and the town you actually walk today was built in part from the older places' own stones.

The city that was built to face the sea

Ephesus was engineered as a downhill machine. On The Marble City you begin at the top, in the State Agora, where the council met in the roofed Odeon (also called the Bouleuterion) and the Prytaneion kept a sacred civic flame that was meant never to go out. From that civic brain the marble streets run down. Curetes Street, the processional spine, still shows its original ancient paving worn into ruts by centuries of carts and feet, lined once with shops, fountains, and monuments. It descends past the small carved facade of the Temple of Hadrian, built around one hundred and eighteen A D in Hadrian's own lifetime and dedicated jointly to the emperor, to Artemis, and to the people of the city.

Halfway down, a modern roof shelters the Terrace Houses, the homes of the rich. These elite residences climbed the north slope of Bulbuldagi in blocks of stepped apartments, occupied from about the first century B C into the seventh century A D. They preserve some of the finest floor mosaics and wall frescoes in the Roman world, along with marble panelling, piped running water, indoor latrines, and hypocaust heating that warmed the floors from below. It is the private counterpart to the public grandeur outside.

At the foot of the street stands the image everyone carries away: the two-storey marble facade of the Library of Celsus. It is richer than it looks, because this library is also a tomb. Tiberius Julius Aquila raised it around one hundred and ten to one hundred and thirty-five A D for his father, the senator Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, who lies buried in a crypt directly beneath the reading room. Its four facade statues personify wisdom, virtue, intelligence, and knowledge. The facade you see was reassembled from collapsed fragments by anastylosis between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy-eight, led by the German archaeologist Volker Michael Strocka.

Beside the library opens the Commercial Agora, the square market, entered through the triple Gate of Mazeus and Mithridates, dedicated in four to three B C to the emperor Augustus. The gate was funded by two of Augustus's own freedmen, former slaves who paid for the grand entrance to the city's busiest marketplace as a gift of thanks. Above it, cut into the slope of Mount Pion, is the Great Theatre, seating about twenty-five thousand, the largest in Asia Minor. The Book of Acts sets here the riot of the silversmiths led by Demetrius against the Apostle Paul, the crowd shouting "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians." It is the moment the old religion and a new faith collided in public.

The harbour that silted, the road that points at nothing

The whole descent ends at the Arcadian Way, a colonnaded avenue more than five hundred metres long that once ran arrow-straight from the theatre to the harbour. Rebuilt around four hundred A D under the emperor Arcadius, it was famously lit at night by lamps, an honour tradition grants only to Rome and Antioch. And now that lamp-lit road points at empty ground. The Kucuk Menderes river, the ancient Cayster, carried silt into the bay year after year until the sea retreated about five kilometres and marsh took its place. Not conquest but silt killed Ephesus. The great port was left stranded inland, and its trade died with the water.

That vanished harbour is where the second walk begins.

When the greatest monuments are absences

The Wonder That Vanished is a walk about disappearance and relocation, where the most important sights are things you can barely see. It opens in a flat, damp field where the Temple of Artemis once rose, an Ionic marble temple larger than the Parthenon in Athens. Today a single column, stacked from miscellaneous fragments and re-erected in modern times, stands in the water table so that visitors have something to look at. The site was lost for centuries and rediscovered only in eighteen sixty-nine after years of searching the mud. Tradition blames a man named Herostratus for burning the temple in three hundred and fifty-six B C to make his name immortal, which is why reckless fame at any cost is still called herostratic. Modern scholars question whether he was truly the cause.

From the field the walk climbs. The Isa Bey Mosque, built between thirteen seventy-four and thirteen seventy-five for a ruler of the Aydinid beylik, is the theme made physical: its architect, Ali of Damascus, modelled it on the Great Mosque of Damascus and raised it on granite and marble columns carried up from Ephesus and its harbour baths. A Turkish house of worship stands on a Roman skeleton. Higher still is the Ayasuluk Fortress, whose walls stack Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman construction. From its parapet the whole plain is legible. Down there stood Ephesus; when the Seljuk Turks first took the site in ten ninety, the once-mighty city had already shrunk to a village. Ephesus did not vanish so much as move, uphill, to this hill.

On the slope spread the wide foundations of the Basilica of Saint John, a domed cruciform church commissioned by the emperor Justinian, begun around five hundred and forty-eight A D and finished by five hundred and sixty-five, one of the largest churches of its century. By church tradition Saint John the Evangelist was buried on this spot, and the grave still marks the crossing of the plan. The monogram of the empress Theodora survives on some of its capitals. After the Turkish conquest it became a mosque, then a ruin, now partly re-raised.

The town that never emptied

The walk resolves back in the living town. In the Ephesus Museum in Selcuk you finally meet the goddess of the empty field face to face: the Great Artemis, nearly three metres tall with a tiered crown carved with tiny temples, and the Beautiful Artemis, unearthed in nineteen fifty-six. Both show the many-breasted, many-egged figure whose meaning scholars still debate. Then the town itself: a row of tall Roman and Byzantine aqueduct arches threads the centre of Selcuk, and from roughly March through September migrating storks nest on top of them. The last stop is optional, the Grotto of the Seven Sleepers on Mount Pion, where excavations in the nineteen twenties uncovered several hundred fifth and sixth-century graves tied to a legend of sleepers who woke to a changed world, a tale recorded early by Gregory of Tours and preserved in the Quran.

Here is the whole story in one view: Roman arches overhead, storks nesting on them, and a Turkish town living its ordinary life underneath. The wonder vanished. The great city moved and fell silent. But the settlement never entirely stopped. It simply shifted ground and kept going.

Sources

• Roamer tour transcript, The Marble City (Ephesus), fact-audited stop content on the State Agora, Curetes Street, Library of Celsus, and the Arcadian Way.
• Roamer tour transcript, The Wonder That Vanished (Selcuk / Ayasuluk), fact-audited stop content on the Temple of Artemis, Isa Bey Mosque, Ayasuluk Fortress, and the Basilica of Saint John.
• World History Encyclopedia, entry on the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (cited in tour content for the sixth-century B C rebuild and Croesus of Lydia).
• Ephesus UNESCO World Heritage Site listing, inscribed twenty fifteen (site scope covering the Artemision, Ayasuluk hill, and the ancient city).
• Ephesus Archaeological Museum, Selcuk (collection of the Great and Beautiful Artemis statues and finds from the Artemision and Basilica of Saint John).