Things to do
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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 same ticket, so the two are walked in a single visit.
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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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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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Şirince
A hill village of Greek stone houses about eight kilometres east of Selçuk, emptied in the 1923 population exchange and repopulated from the plain. Olive oil, peaches and wine keep it going alongside tourism, and remains of Roman aqueducts line the road up. It sells fruit wine to coach parties by day and becomes a different place once they leave in the evening.
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Temple of Artemis
One column, rebuilt from fragments, standing in a marshy field on the edge of Selçuk where a temple four times the size of the Parthenon once drew pilgrims from across the Greek world. Burned by an arsonist, rebuilt and destroyed again, it survives now as foundations and fragments, and the scale of what is missing is the point of going.
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Çamlık Railway Museum
An open-air yard of 33 steam locomotives built between 1891 and 1951, more than half of them German, laid out on the original tracks of the old İzmir to Aydın line in a pine valley near Ephesus. Half the engines stand around a turntable, plaques give the technical details, and climbing up into the cabs 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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İsa Bey Mosque
A mosque of 1375 built at the foot of the Ayasuluk hill for the Aydinid ruler Isa Bey by a Syrian architect, its plan modelled on the Great Mosque of Damascus. Its courtyard of twelve columns is usually empty, İznik tiles ring the rims of its domes, and its west facade is the finest carved surface in the town.
