Guide to Turkey’s iconic ancient ruin
Ephesus (Efes)
In the ancient world, travelers from all over noted the awesome beauty of the Temple of Artemis. It was perfect. It was stunning. It was so beautiful that a guy named Herostratus wanted to achieve immortality by burning it to the ground, so I guess since I’m mentioning him in a weekly travel article 2,373 years later, mission accomplished. It was rebuilt several times, but the successive versions were nowhere near as good. Now all that’s left is a single standing reconstructed column in a field of golden grass with boggy patches.
But don’t worry about that. Ephesus, just down the highway, never fails to impress. If you’re looking for somewhere to take your parents when they come visit, it’d have to be Ephesus. They have real colonnaded streets, a theater, and of course, the impressive façade of the Library of Celsus.
But let’s back up. Ephesus has been continuously inhabited for something like 5,000 years, by Hittites, Mira, and Luwians, the latter two of which I had no idea existed until I started writing this article. Ionian Greeks colonized the place and joined 11 other city-states to form the Ionian league, a potent naval and mercantile force in the eastern Aegean. During Roman times, the city’s population swelled to more than 250,000. Next to modern Istanbul’s nearly 16 million, it doesn’t sound like so much, but Ephesus was a swarming metropolis in the ancient world. It used to be a coastal city — but inhabitants dredged the natural harbor there so many times in the several-thousand-year history of the city that the coast eventually retreated and its population gradually moved on. Settlers used the once-proud marble city blocks as cornerstones for their new houses.
We can get a good idea of Hellenistic and Roman life from the layout of their cities. Public activity was centered on the agora (the market), the baths, and the theater. In Ephesus, you can still see all three well preserved. Residents could participate in commerce in politics in the marketplace, they all enjoyed good public health due to the baths’ public cleanliness, and they enjoyed shows at the 25,000-seat theater, the largest in the ancient world. The Greeks watched their dramas, but the Romans preferred gladiatorial combat instead. Take a moment to really imagine that. There was a whole empire of millions of people that relied on guys fighting each other (and bears and lions, I suppose) to the death as public spectacle. Today, we have kind of a hybrid Hellenic and Roman sense of theater — we perpetually simulate dangerous experiences with action movies, but also we love a good soap opera.
Ephesus has its main attraction, though, beyond the regular trappings of social life found in all the cities I’ve listed here — they had one of the most impressive libraries in the ancient world. Well, after Alexandria and Pergamon. Named after a Roman senator, it housed more than 12,000 scrolls. All of these scrolls had to be written by hand, and all of them had to be stored in some logical accessible fashion, organized only by tricky mental systems. Austrian archaeologists have spent the last hundred years (though they lost their permission to continue the dig in August of last year) remaking Ephesus, and their reconstructed façade for the Celsus library stands as their most stunning achievement. It’s a marble house of cards, columns and lintel stones and four statues stacked on top of each other, safeguarding the knowledge within.
The Greeks and Romans managed to figure out most of what we consider modern civilized life about 2,000 years ago. For your next vacation, lose some of that contemporary hubris by staring at a pile of debris.
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