Ephesus

• 1. Introduction

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  Ephesus once held a building so vast that the ancient writer Pausanias called it the largest structure in the world. That building was the Temple of Artemis, completed around 550 BC, and it drew pilgrims, merchants, and kings to a city on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Standing over 100 marble pillars, each 56 feet high, it would be designated one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Today, a single inconspicuous column marks its location.

  Ephesus was founded in the 10th century BC and, across more than two thousand years, passed through Greek, Lydian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman hands before eventually being abandoned entirely by the 15th century. Its harbour silted up, its population shrank, and the city that Strabo ranked second in the world only to Rome became farmland and rubble. Yet the questions its story raises are still alive: How does a city this powerful disappear? What did its residents actually believe, build, and fight over? And why does it keep resurfacing at the center of so many histories at once?

• 2. Before the Greeks Arrived

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  Humans were living around the site of Ephesus by roughly 6000 BC, as excavations at nearby mounds called Arvalya and Cukurici have shown. Long before any Greek colonist set foot on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, the place had already accumulated thousands of years of habitation.

  By the Late Bronze Age, the city known to Hittite sources as Apasa served as capital of the kingdom of Arzawa, an independent state in western Anatolia. Scholars have argued that Apasa and Ephesus are the same place, and that the two names are linguistically related. In 1954, a burial ground from the Mycenaean era, dated to around 1500-1400 BC, was discovered near the ruins of the Basilica of St. John. The ceramic pots found there pointed to the period of Mycenaean expansion, when settlers called the Ahhiyawa were moving into Asia Minor.

  The Greek mythological tradition told a different founding story. A prince of Athens named Androklos was said to have established Ephesus after consulting the oracle at Delphi. The oracle reportedly said: "A fish and a boar will show you the way." Androklos went on to unite twelve cities into the Ionian League. He died fighting alongside Priene, another League member, in a battle against the Carians. A frieze on the Temple of Hadrian, dating from the 2nd century AD, still depicts Androklos alongside his dog.

• 3. The Weight of the Temple

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  Croesus, the legendary rich king of Lydia, besieged Ephesus in the 7th or 6th century BC. The Ephesians responded by stretching a rope from their city walls to the sanctuary of Artemis, placing the whole city under the goddess's protection. Croesus relented. He then became, according to the sources, the main contributor to rebuilding the Temple of Artemis.

  That temple measured 418 feet by 239 feet. Pliny recorded that it took 120 years to build. The structure earned Ephesus the formal title "Servant of the Goddess." In 356 BC, a man named Herostratus burned it down, reportedly seeking fame. The Ephesians immediately began planning a larger replacement.

  When Alexander the Great entered Ephesus in triumph in 334 BC after defeating the Persians at the Battle of Granicus, he found the new temple still unfinished. He offered to pay for its completion and have his name inscribed on it. The Ephesians declined, arguing it was not fitting for one god to build a temple to another. The diplomacy of that refusal says something about the city's self-confidence even under Macedonian rule.

  The temple was eventually destroyed by the Goths in 263 AD. The British Museum sponsored excavations at the site beginning in 1863, led by architect John Turtle Wood. He found the pavement of the temple in 1869, though the dig closed in 1874 without the expected further discoveries. What remains today is one column, re-erected from fragments found on site.

• 4. Paul, John, and the Christian City

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  From AD 52 to 54, the apostle Paul spent three years in Ephesus. He began in the Jewish synagogue, but after three months moved his base to the school of a man named Tyrannus. He introduced around twelve followers to what the sources describe as baptism with the Holy Spirit. Between 53 and 57 AD, Paul wrote the letter known as 1 Corinthians from within Ephesus, possibly while briefly imprisoned in a structure near the harbour.

  A silversmith named Demetrios stirred the most dramatic opposition. He argued that Paul's preaching endangered the livelihoods of craftsmen who made silver shrines of Artemis, and he roused a mob against him. Paul eventually left the city. He later wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians from prison in Rome, around 62 AD.

  John the Apostle is said to have come to Ephesus and to have died there of natural causes sometime after 98 AD, during the reign of Trajan. This made him, by tradition, the only apostle who did not die as a martyr. His tomb is believed to be beneath what became the Basilica of St. John at Selcuk, built in the 6th century under emperor Justinian I. The Gospel of John may have been composed in Ephesus around 90-100 AD.

  A tradition first recorded in the 4th century by Epiphanius of Salamis held that Mary, the mother of Jesus, spent her final years in Ephesus. Since the 19th century, a structure about eight kilometers from Selcuk has been identified as the House of the Virgin Mary, drawing on visions described by Augustinian sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, who lived from 1774 to 1824. Three popes have visited the site. The Church of Mary near the harbour hosted the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, which condemned the teachings of Nestorius.

• 5. Rome's Second City

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  When Augustus became emperor in 27 BC, he shifted the capital of the Roman province of proconsular Asia from Pergamum to Ephesus. Strabo, writing in that era, ranked Ephesus second in size and importance only to Rome itself. The city became both the seat of the provincial governor and a major hub of Mediterranean trade.

  The Library of Celsus was built in memory of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, a Greek who served as governor of Roman Asia from 105 to 107 AD. His son Gaius Julius Aquila paid for and largely completed it using his father's personal wealth. Celsus himself is buried in a sarcophagus beneath the building. The library once held nearly 12,000 scrolls. Its facade was designed with an exaggerated entrance to make the building appear larger than it was, and it faces east to let morning light into the reading rooms. The facade was reconstructed between 1970 and 1978 using original fragments.

  The Great Theatre seated an estimated 25,000 people and is believed to be the largest open-air theatre in the ancient world. It hosted drama and, later, gladiatorial combat. In May 2007, archaeologists found the first confirmed gladiator graveyard there. The city also maintained at least six aqueducts of varying sizes, one of which fed a sawmill for marble. A smaller theatre, the Odeon, was built around 150 AD by Publius Vedius Antoninus and his wife; it seated about 1,500 people and featured 22 stairs and red granite pillars in the Corinthian style.

  Estimates of the Roman-era population range widely. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, using inhabited land of around 345 hectares, arrived at figures between roughly 138,000 and 172,500. A 2017 demographic model by Hanson and Ortman, working from an inhabited area of 263 hectares, yielded an estimate of 71,587 inhabitants. Even at the lower end, Ephesus ranked among the largest cities of Roman Asia Minor.

• 6. Centuries of Unraveling

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  In 88 BC, Ephesus welcomed Archelaus, a general of Mithridates of Pontus, when Roman tax collectors had pushed the city to the breaking point. From Ephesus, Mithridates then issued an order to kill every Roman citizen in the province, an event the sources call the Asiatic Vespers. Around 80,000 people died. Statues and monuments of Roman citizens in Ephesus were destroyed. When the Roman consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla defeated Mithridates in 86 BC, he imposed five years of back taxes on top of a heavy indemnity, leaving the city and its neighbours in debt for a long time afterward.

  King Ptolemy XII of Egypt passed time in Ephesus in 57 BC after the Roman Senate refused to restore him to his throne. In 33 BC, Mark Antony gathered a fleet of 800 ships at Ephesus before the Battle of Actium.

  The Goths destroyed the city in 263 AD. Emperor Constantine later rebuilt much of it and erected new public baths. In 614, an earthquake partially destroyed it again. Excavations in 2022 found evidence that large parts of the city had already been heavily damaged in 614-615 during the Sasanian War, which triggered a sharp drop in population. Arab raids followed, beginning with Caliph Muawiyah I in 654-655, then again in 700 and 716.

  On the 24th of October 1304, the town surrendered to a Turkish warlord named Sasa Bey of the Mentesogullari principality. The terms were violated: the church of Saint John was pillaged and most of the remaining population was deported to Thyrea, Greece. Ephesus passed to the Aydinid principality and then became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1390. The Central Asian warlord Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans in 1402, and after a period of instability the region was reabsorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1425. By the 15th century, Ephesus was completely abandoned. The ruins were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, and the nearby town whose name had been a corrupted form of the original Greek was officially renamed Selcuk as recently as 1914.