EVER - CHANGING EPHESUS

It is one of the most popular archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, but how many visitors know that the ruins they see are those of a new city, not the old? And how many know the rich myth-history of the ancient Ephesians? David Stuttard is our guide.

- David Stuttard

The philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived at the turn of the 5th century BC, is famed for many observations. Visiting the ruins of his home city today, two seem particularly apposite: ‘the cool becomes hot, the hot becomes cool; the wet becomes dry, the dry becomes wet’; and ‘nothing stays the same’. For what was then a thriving port, its lanes fanned by sea breezes, is now landlocked. Its once-glittering Artemision, the Sanctuary of Artemis, whose early temple had been built with funds from Lydia’s King Croesus, lies half submerged in swampy marshland, its foundations home to frogs and basking turtles, one single reconstructed column colonised by nesting storks. Even the city’s location has changed: the marble streets that are today thronged with slow-moving, polyglot processions of jostling tourists who stop only to gaze at the Theatre or the Library of Celsus are not those of Heraclitus’ Ephesus, but of the later Hellenistic and Roman settlement. How right he was that ‘everything is in a state of flux’. Yet, while Heraclitus was honing his philosophy, many of his fellow citizens were turning elsewhere – to religion and mythology – not least to seek out certainties about their civic history and the temple at the heart of their community.