The story of Ephesus

People were already living around Ephesus in about 6000 BC, during the Neolithic, as the nearby mounds of Çukuriçi and Arvalya reveal. In the 10th century BC, Attic and Ionian Greek colonists built the city on the site of the old Arzawan capital, and Ephesus became one of the twelve cities of Ionia. The city you walk through today was refounded around 300 BC by Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great's generals, on the grid plan of Hippodamus of Miletus.

It flourished after passing to Rome in 129 BC. Walk past the Library of Celsus and climb the theatre, completed under Trajan (98-117) and able to seat 25,000. Ephesus was one of the seven churches of Asia in the Book of Revelation, and the Gospel of John may have been written here.

The Goths destroyed it in 263, its harbour slowly silted up from the Küçük Menderes, and an earthquake struck in 614. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 and was Türkiye's most visited museum in 2024.