The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: What Remains of the Ancient Wonder

Ancient writers ranked it among the Seven Wonders of the World, and some thought it the greatest of them. Today the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is a single patched-together column standing in a marshy field on the edge of Selçuk, usually with a stork’s nest on top. It takes some imagination to see past that, and the story of how a building larger than the Parthenon came to this is one of the best in Anatolian history: a Lydian king’s gift, an arsonist who wanted to be remembered, a city that turned down Alexander the Great, and an English architect who spent six years digging for it. On Day 16 of our Small Group Tour of Ancient Turkey, the group visits the temple site on the same day as ancient Ephesus, its terrace houses and the Archaeological Museum.

Where is the Temple of Artemis?

The temple site lies on the western edge of Selçuk, under a kilometre from the town centre and about three kilometres by road from the lower entrance to the excavated city of Ephesus. That separation surprises many visitors, but it reflects the history. The sanctuary of Artemis is older than the city most people come to see: UNESCO dates its origins to the second millennium BC, as the shrine of an Anatolian mother goddess. After Alexander’s death, Lysimachus, one of his generals, refounded Ephesus on a new site between the hills, leaving the old settlement around the Artemision behind. The Roman streets and the Library of Celsus described in our guide to the ruins of Ephesus belong to that later city. Since 2015 both the ancient city and the temple site have formed part of the Ephesus World Heritage property.

The archaic temple and the gift of Croesus

Excavation has identified several shrines on the site before the great temple, the earliest of them modest. The building that made the sanctuary famous was begun around 550 BC. Its architects, according to Vitruvius and Pliny, were the Cretan Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, and its most famous patron was Croesus, king of Lydia, who had brought Ephesus under his control. Herodotus records that Croesus gave most of the columns, and a column fragment carrying his dedication was found on the site.

The result was enormous. Britannica gives its dimensions as about 110 by 55 metres, and Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, described 127 columns some 18 metres high, many of them carved with figures around their lower drums. Because the ground was marshy, Pliny says the builders laid the foundations on packed charcoal; excavators later found charcoal layers beneath the platform. Beneath the temple, early twentieth-century archaeologists also found a deposit of offerings that included some of the earliest coins ever struck, small lumps of electrum now partly held by the British Museum.

Herostratus and the fire of 356 BC

In 356 BC the temple was set alight and its timber roof and interior were destroyed. Ancient tradition names the arsonist as Herostratus, a man who is said to have done it purely to make his name live forever. The Ephesians reportedly decreed that his name should never be spoken, which obviously failed. Plutarch later tied the fire to the night Alexander the Great was born, quoting the historian Hegesias of Magnesia’s quip that Artemis was too busy attending the birth to save her own temple. Some modern historians are wary of the Herostratus story, but the fire is traditionally dated to 356 BC.

The later temple and Alexander’s offer

The Ephesians rebuilt on the same spot, raising the new temple on a higher platform but largely keeping the plan of its predecessor. Ancient writers credit the architect Cheirocrates, sometimes identified with Deinocrates. When Alexander reached Ephesus in 334 BC he offered to pay for the work, provided his name was inscribed on it. According to Strabo, the Ephesians declined with a diplomatic reply: it was not fitting for one god to dedicate a temple to another.

Like its predecessor, the later temple had carved lower column drums, and the finest surviving example is in the British Museum. Dated to 340 to 320 BC and almost two metres tall, it shows Hermes, guide of souls, beside a youthful figure of Death and a woman usually identified as Alcestis. It was this rebuilt temple that later lists of the Seven Wonders celebrated, and that drew pilgrims and gifts across the Hellenistic and Roman world.

How did the Temple of Artemis disappear?

Through raid, neglect and centuries of quarrying. Britannica records that invading Goths destroyed the temple in AD 262; some historians date the raid a few years later, to 267 or 268. It was never rebuilt on its former scale. In the 390s the decrees of Emperor Theodosius I against pagan cult ended formal worship, and by the fifth century, UNESCO notes, pilgrimage to Ephesus had shifted to the Church of Mary in the city and the Basilica of St John on the hill above.

The abandoned temple then became a convenient source of cut marble, and its blocks were reused in buildings across the area. A persistent story holds that columns in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople came from it; historians such as Cyril Mango have dismissed the idea. What the quarrying left, the river silt and rising groundwater buried. By the nineteenth century nobody knew exactly where the temple had stood.

Rediscovery by John Turtle Wood

The search was led by John Turtle Wood, an English architect who had come to Turkey to design stations for the Smyrna and Aydın railway, and who later dug with the support of the British Museum. Beginning in 1863, he searched for six years before finding the temple on the last day of 1869, buried about six metres down, and he kept digging until 1874. The sculptures he found went to London. David Hogarth returned for the British Museum in 1904 and identified the earlier phases of the temple and its foundation deposit. Austrian archaeologists, who have worked at Ephesus since the 1890s, later re-examined the sanctuary and its great altar.

What is left to see at the Temple of Artemis today?

One column, the outline of the foundations and scattered marble, set in a field that often holds standing water. The column was re-erected in modern times from drums recovered on the site, and it stands well short of the original height. Around it you can trace parts of the platform, and in wet months a shallow pool forms over the lowest ground. The more rewarding view is outwards: from the temple site, the Isa Bey Mosque, the Basilica of St John and the walls of the Ayasuluk fortress are all in sight on the slope above, which places the temple in Selçuk’s long run of sacred buildings. Most visitors find 15 to 30 minutes enough.

Do you need a ticket for the Temple of Artemis?

At the time of writing, no: the site is open-air and free, and visitors view the ruins from the paths around it. Rules can change while archaeological work is under way, so check before you go if you are travelling independently. On the tour, applicable entry fees and the services of a local English-speaking guide are included.

Is the temple site easy to walk around?

Mostly, though the ground is not paved. The site is flat, but the paths are gravel and grass, uneven in places and muddy after rain, and there is very little shade. Comfortable shoes with grip and a hat are worth having. The tour as a whole is graded Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity a day and up to eight kilometres of walking on uneven ground.

Why the Temple of Artemis is worth the stop

It would be easy to dismiss a single column as an anticlimax after the theatre and marble streets of Ephesus. That would miss the point. Here you are standing on the spot where the city’s wealth and reputation began, at a sanctuary that drew offerings from Lydian kings and Roman emperors, and whose goddess made Ephesus famous. It is also where Greek, Anatolian and Christian traditions meet: the cult statue of Ephesian Artemis was nothing like the huntress of Greek myth, and the Acts of the Apostles records the riot of the Ephesian silversmiths, alarmed that Paul’s preaching would hurt their trade in her shrines.

The visit also connects to the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selçuk, which the tour visits the same day. Its Roman statues of Ephesian Artemis, found in the city’s Prytaneion, show the goddess as her worshippers knew her, crowned and hung with rows of oval ornaments, and give the empty field outside its missing centre.

The Ephesus day within the journey

The temple falls in the middle of the Aegean section of the tour. The day before, the group drives from Pamukkale to Aphrodisias and its marble workshops, and the Ephesus day follows from a base in Kuşadası, with the Virgin Mary’s House also on the programme. After a free day, the group drives up to the hill village of Şirince, among its vineyards and orchards, before heading north to Pergamon, its acropolis and the Asclepion, and on to Troy. Our 21-day ancient Turkey itinerary from Istanbul to Gallipoli sets out the whole route.

On the Small Group Tour of Ancient Turkey, an Odyssey Program Leader and local English-speaking guides bring these sites together for a small group of up to 16 travellers, with time at the temple to look across the marsh to the hill where Ephesus’s later history was written.