Things to do
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Ephesus
The best preserved classical city on the Mediterranean, walked downhill from the upper gate past the council house, the Library of Celsus and a theatre seating twenty-four thousand. The Terrace Houses are ticketed separately and hold the frescoes and mosaics of the rich quarter.
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Ephesus Archaeological Museum
The town museum that holds what was carried out of Ephesus, including the two marble Artemis statues hung with rows of ovoid forms and the frescoes from the terrace houses. It is small, air-conditioned and best done after the site.
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İsa Bey Mosque
A Seljuk-era mosque of 1375 built at the foot of the Ayasuluk hill from columns and stone quarried out of Ephesus. Its courtyard is usually empty and its west facade is the finest carved surface in the town.
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Şirince
A hill village of Greek stone houses above Selçuk, emptied in the 1923 population exchange and repopulated from the plain. It sells fruit wine to coach parties by day and is a different place in the evening.
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Basilica of St John
The sixth-century church Justinian raised over the reputed grave of the apostle John, once one of the largest in the world and now a ruin of columns and marble floor on the Ayasuluk hill. The castle above it is included in the ticket.
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Çamlık Railway Museum
An open-air yard of about thirty steam locomotives, most of them German and American engines left over from the Anatolian railways, standing on tracks in a pine valley. Climbing on them is permitted.
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House of the Virgin Mary
A small stone chapel on Bülbül Dağı identified in the nineteenth century as the house where Mary spent her last years, and a pilgrimage site for Catholics and Muslims alike. It is a short drive up from the Ephesus gate.
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Library of Celsus
The two-storey facade built around 117 as a tomb and library for a Roman governor of Asia, re-erected from its fallen stones in the 1970s. It stands at the foot of the marble street and is the image the whole site is known by.
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Temple of Artemis
One column, rebuilt from fragments, standing in a marshy field where a temple four times the size of the Parthenon once drew pilgrims from across the Greek world. The scale of what is missing is the point of going.