The Temple of Artemis and How Selcuk Reads Its Own Absences

Stand at the edge of a flat, damp field on the outskirts of Selcuk and you are looking at one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. There is almost nothing to see: reeds, standing water, and a single column stacked from mismatched fragments and re-erected in modern times so that visitors would have something to face. That absence is the whole point. The Temple of Artemis, the vanished wonder, is the way into a town that has spent two thousand years surviving the disappearance of its own famous places, and reading that empty field correctly changes how you walk everything that follows.

The temple itself was not modest. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the second great version rose around the sixth century B C, took something like a hundred and twenty years to build, and drew on the wealth of Croesus of Lydia. It was an Ionic marble temple, roughly double the dimensions of ordinary Greek temples, larger even than the Parthenon in Athens, with columns about eighteen metres tall. Then it was gone. Tradition says a man named Herostratus set it ablaze in 356 B C purely to make his name immortal, and that the goddess Artemis missed the fire because she was away attending the birth of Alexander the Great. Modern scholars question whether Herostratus was truly the cause, so treat it as tradition. What is certain: the temple was rebuilt, damaged again by the Goths around 268 A D, and finally lost around 401 A D. The site itself vanished so completely that it was rediscovered only in 1869, after years of searching in the mud.

Why the empty field explains the town

Hold the contrast for a moment. The fame is immense. The remains are one column in a wet field. This is the paradox the entire route turns on, and once you have felt it here, you begin to see it everywhere in Selcuk. The next stop makes the theme physical. Climb the western slope of Ayasuluk hill to the Isa Bey Mosque, built between 1374 and 1375 for a ruler of the Aydinid beylik, one of the small Turkish principalities that governed this coast before the Ottomans. Look closely at the columns holding it up. Much of that granite and marble did not begin here. The builders carried it up from Ephesus and its harbour baths and reused it as spolia, giving a Turkish house of worship a Roman skeleton. Its architect, Ali of Damascus, modelled the building on the Great Mosque of Damascus far to the south. The city that vanished did not simply disappear. It changed hands, and its stones went back to work.

Keep climbing to the crown of the hill, where the Ayasuluk Fortress holds the medieval town's strong point. Its earliest walls go back to about the sixth century A D, with later Seljuk and Ottoman rebuilding, and the circuit runs to roughly fifteen towers and two gates enclosing houses, a small mosque, cisterns, and baths. From the parapet the story becomes legible in a single view. Down on the plain, where the land runs flat toward what was once the sea, stood Ephesus. Its harbour silted up, malaria rose in the stagnant ground, raids came in the seventh century, and slowly the people gave up the port and climbed toward this hill. The Seljuk Turks took the place in 1090, when once-mighty Ephesus had already shrunk to a village. Ephesus is not truly gone. It moved uphill, to right where you are standing.

A church, a museum, and the goddess herself

On the same slope spread the wide foundations of the Basilica of Saint John, a great domed cruciform church commissioned by the emperor Justinian. Construction began around 548 A D and was completed by 565. By church tradition, Saint John the Evangelist spent his last years preaching at Ephesus and was buried on this spot, and the grave still marks the crossing of the plan. That connection is tradition, not plain fact, and the tour is careful to say so. What is solid is the building's later life: the empress Theodora's monogram survives carved on some of its capitals, the emperor Constantine the Sixth is recorded visiting in 797 and donating gold, and after the Turkish conquest of the fourteenth century the church became a mosque before falling to ruin.

Then comes the turn. After a walk full of absences, the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selcuk town is the room where things reappear. Here you finally meet the goddess of that empty field face to carved face. Two marble cult statues of Artemis of Ephesus stand at its heart: the Great Artemis, nearly three metres tall, a Roman copy from around the reign of Trajan with a tiered crown carved with tiny temples, and the Beautiful Artemis, smaller, from the second century A D, unearthed only in 1956. Both show the many-breasted, many-egged figure that blends an old Anatolian fertility image with the Greek goddess, and scholars still argue over what the rows of ovoid shapes represent. The vanished wonder acquires an actual face at last.

The walk closes back in the everyday town. A row of tall Roman arches, restored under the Byzantines, threads the centre of Selcuk, and from roughly March through September migrating storks build great untidy nests on top of them, turning an ancient waterway into a bird sanctuary in mid-air. This is the quiet resolution. Selcuk is the living successor to both Ephesus on the plain and medieval Ayasuluk on the hill. Both emptied out. This town did not. The modern name has only been used since 1914, honouring the Seljuk Turks. An optional final stop, the Grotto of the Seven Sleepers on the slope of Mount Pion, adds a legend of sleepers who woke to a changed world, over a real necropolis where excavations in the 1920s uncovered several hundred graves of the fifth and sixth centuries.

Walk it in order

The sequence matters here more than in most cities, because each stop reframes the last. Plan about two hours over five kilometres of gentle ground with one short, steep climb, and wear sturdy shoes for the marshy field and uneven hilltop paving. You can compare the route with the other Selcuk options among the Selcuk (Ephesus) walking tours, or start from the Selcuk (Ephesus) city page. Begin, as the tour does, at the Temple of Artemis field. Let the empty ground do its work, then follow the city as it climbs, changes faith, and keeps going.

Sources

• World History Encyclopedia, "Temple of Artemis at Ephesus": dating, scale, and the Croesus-funded rebuild used throughout the opening.
• Wikipedia, "Temple of Artemis": destruction phases, the Herostratus tradition, and the 1869 rediscovery.
• Wikipedia, "Isa Bey Mosque": construction dates, the Aydinid beylik, Ali of Damascus, and the reuse of Ephesus spolia.
• Wikipedia, "Basilica of St. John": Justinian's commission, Theodora's monogram, and the church-to-mosque conversion.
• Ephesus Archaeological Museum (Wikipedia / Turkish Archaeological News): the two Artemis statues and the museum's role holding Ephesus finds.