Five Corners of Ephesus Nobody Photographs

Watch the flow of visitors from the top of Curetes Street and you will see the same pattern all day: a steady walk, three stops, and a crowd at the library. Which leaves large parts of one of the great ancient cities almost entirely to itself.

Here are five places we take people who have an extra half hour, in the order you meet them walking down.

1. The Prytaneion and its eternal flame

Near the top, just past the Odeon, is a terrace of column bases most people cross without slowing. This was the Prytaneion — the town hall, and the sacred hearth of Ephesus.

A fire burned here continuously, tended by officials, and its extinction would have been read as the end of the city's luck. The two magnificent Artemis statues now in the Selçuk museum were found buried here — hidden, most probably, when Christianity arrived and the old cult became dangerous.

Stand on it knowing that and it stops being rubble. Somebody buried their goddess in this floor.

2. The Temple of Domitian and the erased emperor

On the terrace below, the Temple of Domitian is one of the strangest stories on the site. Ephesus won the privilege of building an imperial temple — an enormous honour, and a competitive one between the cities of Asia.

Then Domitian was assassinated in 96 AD and the Senate condemned his memory. His name was chiselled out of inscriptions across the empire, and the temple was quietly rededicated to his father Vespasian.

You can see the erasure. That is the point: not the architecture, but the deliberate hole in the record, cut by hand, still legible nineteen centuries later. More on Domitian Square.

3. The Octagon, and a possible royal grave

Halfway down Curetes Street, on the left as you descend, is a small octagonal monument that almost nobody stops at. Inside it was found the sarcophagus of a young woman, perhaps twenty years old.

One long-running theory identifies her as Arsinoe IV — the younger sister of Cleopatra, exiled to Ephesus and murdered on Mark Antony's orders in 41 BC, reportedly on the steps of the Temple of Artemis. The identification is contested and probably unprovable; the skull that would have settled it was lost in the twentieth century.

True or not, it is the only monument on the main street where you might be standing beside a Ptolemy. The full story of the Octagon is worth reading before you go, because you will otherwise walk straight past it.

4. The Grotto of St Paul, on the hill above

Not on the standard route at all — it is on the northern slope of Bülbül Mountain, and access is restricted because of the frescoes inside.

The cave contains early Christian wall paintings including a depiction of Paul with Thecla, a woman whose story circulated widely in the early church and who was, in some versions, shown as an equal teacher. In the painting, her figure was later partly damaged — which historians read as a comment on how the church's view of women teaching changed.

You may not be able to go in, but knowing it is up there changes how you look at the hillside. See the Grotto of Saint Paul.

5. The far end of Harbour Street

Most people photograph the theatre and leave. Walking the full length of the colonnaded Arcadian Way west, towards the flat green field, takes ten minutes and is where you will be most alone at any hour.

At the end of it you are standing where ships tied up. The sea is now five kilometres away. Everything you admired that morning — the library, the temples, the painted houses — was paid for by vessels that arrived at this point, and stopped arriving when the mud won.

Three more, if you are still counting

The Church of Mary, near the Lower Gate — where the Council of Ephesus met in 431 and declared Mary Theotokos. A decision that shaped world Christianity, taken in a building almost every visitor walks past.
The stadium, outside the main site, heavily quarried but enormous.
The Cave of the Seven Sleepers, a short drive away — a necropolis attached to a legend shared by Christianity and Islam, and one of the quietest places in the area.

Why bother with the quiet corners

Partly because they are quiet, which in high season is worth a great deal on its own. But mostly because the famous parts of Ephesus are famous for being beautiful, and the overlooked parts are where the city is strange.

A buried goddess, an erased emperor, a possible sister of Cleopatra, a damaged painting of a woman who taught, and a road that ends in a field. That is a better afternoon than another photograph of a facade — and the facade will still be there on the way past.