Ephesus, and the library built to be seen from the harbour

Ephesus is inland now, its ruins sitting several miles from the modern Aegean coastline, which makes it easy to forget that this was once one of the great port cities of the ancient world, its harbour busy with trade from across the Mediterranean. The Cayster River that made the harbour possible also, over many centuries, silted it up entirely, and the sea simply withdrew, leaving the city stranded but remarkably intact, since nobody built a modern town directly on top of it once the water was gone.

A facade built to impress from the water

The most photographed building at Ephesus, the Library of Celsus, was built in the early second century AD as a grand tomb and library for a Roman senator, its two-storey facade decorated with statues personifying wisdom, knowledge, intelligence and virtue. It was deliberately positioned to be seen from the harbour road, a piece of architecture designed as much as a statement of civic pride as a functioning building, and it remains, even in its partially reconstructed state, one of the most complete Roman facades surviving anywhere.

A theatre, and a temple that is mostly gone

Ephesus's Great Theatre, cut into the hillside above the main street, held an estimated twenty-five thousand spectators at its largest, a scale that says a good deal about how significant a city this was in the Roman province of Asia. Less fortunate is the Temple of Artemis, once counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and, by some ancient accounts, four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens; almost nothing of it survives above ground today beyond scattered fragments and a single reconstructed column, a reminder that not every ancient wonder made it to the present in a state fit for a postcard.

The coast Ephesus shared with its neighbours

Ephesus did not stand alone. Further along the Ionian coast, Priene occupies a dramatic terraced hillside site, its street grid one of the best-surviving examples of planned classical town design anywhere in the Greek world, while Didyma held a sanctuary and oracle of Apollo on a scale meant to rival Delphi itself, its temple's surviving columns still towering well above head height. None of these cities draws the numbers Ephesus does, which for many visitors is the appeal: broadly the same quality of ruin, with considerably more room to take it in. Stratonikeia, further inland again, adds a stranger footnote: a Hellenistic and Roman city with a working village still occupying part of its ancient street plan, houses built directly against columns that have stood since antiquity.

A statue-lined street, and a bathhouse turned museum

Curetes Street, the main thoroughfare running down through the heart of Ephesus from the upper city to the Library of Celsus, was lined with statues of the wealthy citizens who had paid for them, a form of advertising as much as commemoration, and terraced houses set just above street level preserve mosaic floors and wall paintings that give a rare, intimate sense of how comfortably the city's better-off residents actually lived. Near the entrance, a large Roman bathhouse complex, one of several the city supported, has been partly restored and now doubles as a small museum of the finds excavated on site, a practical way of keeping objects close to the ground they came from rather than shipping them elsewhere.

Why the silt did Ephesus a favour

It is a strange kind of luck that the very thing which ended Ephesus as a working city, a harbour quietly filling with river sediment over centuries, is also what preserved it so completely: without a functioning port to justify continued investment and rebuilding, the city was largely abandoned rather than developed over, and what remains today is closer to a snapshot of a Roman provincial capital than most surviving ancient sites manage. The sea's slow retreat cost Ephesus its purpose. It may also be the reason there is still so much of it left to walk through.