Ephesus, Troy & the Aegean

Ephesus in three hours

Ephesus was the largest city in Roman Asia, a port of perhaps 200,000 people at its peak in the second century. The harbor silted up long ago, which is why the marble streets now end in a field 5 km from the sea. The same silt buried and preserved the city.

Enter at the upper gate and walk downhill. The first stretch is the state district: the odeion, a small covered theater for the council, the prytaneion where the city's sacred fire burned, and the temple of Domitian. Curetes Street then drops toward the library between columns, fountains and the small temple of Hadrian, built in 138 with its curved arch.

The Terrace Houses

Opposite the temple of Hadrian, a modern roof covers seven houses of wealthy Ephesians built under Augustus and lived in until the seventh century. Their floors are mosaic, their walls are painted, and one dining room still shows its marble panels. The extra ticket is the best money you will spend on this coast.

The library and the theater

The Library of Celsus was built in 135 by Gaius Julius Aquila as a tomb and monument for his father, the governor of Asia. Its two-story facade, with statues of Wisdom, Knowledge, Intelligence and Virtue in the niches, was reassembled from fallen fragments between 1970 and 1978. Behind it, the commercial agora fills a square of 110 m a side.

The theater seats 25,000 and is the place where, according to Acts 19, a silversmiths' riot shouted down St. Paul for two hours. From its top row the Arcadian Way runs straight toward the vanished harbor, 500 m of colonnaded street lit at night by lamps in the fourth century.

Around Ephesus

Selçuk, the town 3 km away, holds the rest. The Ephesus Museum has the two statues of Artemis found in the prytaneion, the marble goddess with rows of eggs on her chest. The Temple of Artemis itself, one of the Seven Wonders, is a single re-erected column in a marsh; it was four times the size of the Parthenon.

On the hill above stands the Basilica of St. John, built in the sixth century over the apostle's tomb by Justinian, the emperor of Hagia Sophia, and beside it the İsa Bey mosque of 1375, a work of the beylik period. The House of the Virgin Mary, 7 km up Bülbül mountain, is a small stone chapel that both Catholic and Muslim pilgrims visit. Şirince, an old Greek wine village 8 km east, is the place to sleep and eat.

Troy

Hisarlık is a low mound 30 km south of Çanakkale, and it is the Troy of Homer. Nine cities stand on top of one another here, from Troy I of around 3000 BC to a Roman town abandoned around AD 500. The sloping stone walls that survive best belong to Troy VI, the prosperous Bronze Age city of 1800 to 1275 BC.

The layer archaeologists tie to the Trojan War is VIIa, destroyed by fire around 1180 BC. Heinrich Schliemann dug through it in 1870, looking for Priam's city, and found a gold hoard in Troy II a thousand years too early. His trench still cuts the mound.

A marked path circles the site in an hour with clear panels at each layer. The Troy Museum at the entrance, opened in 2018, holds the finds and explains the stratigraphy better than the mound can. The UNESCO listing dates from 1998, and Gallipoli's battlefields are an hour away across the strait, which makes Çanakkale a two-night stop.

Pergamon

Bergama, 105 km north of İzmir, sits below one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world. After 301 BC, Philetairos turned a treasury of 9,000 talents into a kingdom, and his successors, Eumenes I, Attalos I and Eumenes II, spent it on an acropolis modeled on Athens.

The library held 200,000 scrolls and gave its name to parchment. In 133 BC, Attalos III left the whole kingdom to Rome in his will.

A cable car climbs to the acropolis. The theater is the steepest of antiquity, 80 rows dropping toward the plain, and the foundations of the Great Altar are beside it; the altar itself has stood in Berlin since 1886. Below the town, the Asklepieion was a healing sanctuary where Galen trained, with a sacred spring and a tunnel for sleeping cures.

İzmir and Bodrum

İzmir was Smyrna, founded around 1000 BC, sacked by Alyattes of Lydia in 600 BC and refounded by Alexander's generals on the slopes of Kadifekale after 334. Today it is Turkey's third city, with a long waterfront, the Kemeraltı bazaar with its old coffeehouses and Turkish delight counters, and the Roman agora in the center. It is a good hub: Ephesus is 75 minutes south and Pergamon 90 minutes north.

Bodrum was Halicarnassus, home of Herodotus and of Mausolus, whose tomb of 353 BC was so large it named every mausoleum since. Stones from it went into the Castle of St. Peter, which the Knights of Rhodes built after 1402.

Süleyman the Magnificent took the castle in 1523, a year after Rhodes, and the coast answered to Topkapı for the next four centuries. The castle now houses the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, the best of its kind. The town is also where the gulets of the Blue Voyage are built.

Practical notes

Fly to İzmir and rent a car, or use the trains and buses from the city: Selçuk is on the line, and Bergama has an hourly bus. Pamukkale and its travertines, 190 km inland, are the usual next stop and belong to the Anatolia sheet. Allow three days for Ephesus and Pergamon, five if you add Troy and Bodrum.

South of Bodrum the shore turns Lycian, and that stretch has its own sheet: Lycia and the Turquoise Coast.

The cities on this coast were Greek before they were Roman and Byzantine before they were Turkish; the history of Anatolia puts the layers in order. The Aegean kitchen of olive oil, wild greens and grilled fish is the lightest in the country, covered in Turkish cuisine. From İzmir, Istanbul is an hour by air, and the fast road to Cappadocia runs through Pamukkale and Konya.

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