Settlement of the land that would become the city of Ephesus began more than 10,000 years BC. A river flowing out of the nearby hills and into the Aegean made an excellent natural harbor, and Ephesus was a popular Greek port town by 500 BC.
The city continued expanding through the transition of empires and reached its peak as a Roman port town around the time of Christ. In fact, it was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, second only to Rome itself.
Not only was Ephesus a major seaport for one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known, it was also a hotbed of growth for what was to become one of the world’s greatest religions.
The apostle Paul lived in Ephesus, building the young Christian church there and organizing missions into the surrounding areas. In the first century AD he wrote Ephesians, the 10th book of the Bible’s New Testament, urging the members of the fledgling church to get along with each other and maintain unity. The Virgin Mary is said to have spent her final years at a small stone complex tucked away into the hills nearby, and to this day Catholic popes are known to make pilgrimages to that complex.
The same river that had given Ephesus so much life, though, was also taking it away. As the river flowed into the sea it slowed and deposited the silt it carried down from the hills above. That silt built up year after year, century after century, and gradually the coastline moved away from Ephesus until Ephesus was no longer a port city.
By 500 AD most of the city’s inhabitants had decamped to other locales. Ephesus shrank to the size of a village so small passersby barely even noticed it, and by the time the Turks began piecing together the Ottoman Empire, Ephesus had been dead for almost a thousand years.
Today the people have been gone for a long time, but the dry climate has been good for the preservation of the city’s ruins. Today you can walk amongst hundreds of marble pillars and building facades, some of the pillars still standing, others lying prone after having fallen over onto the ground many centuries ago.
You can also stroll along the same marble walkway that took vacationing Romans down the hill to a massive stone amphitheater where the great performers of the day held court, and if you use a little imagination, you can become one of those great performers for a moment, pushing your way through a gauntlet of fawning stage hands as you make your way out onto the center stage to receive a standing ovation from tens of thousands of imaginary Romans clad in togas and sandals.
But as much as I enjoy learning about history and imagining fame and fortune, what I really love about Ephesus is the historical perspective it puts on Turkey:
Before the Turks were Turks, when they were just a people thinking about migrating out of their Central Asian homeland, Ephesus had already thrived for over a thousand years as one of the world’s greatest cities.
Turkey, like almost every other country and especially like the US, thinks it is more important than it really is. Outsiders can easily spot hubris but the locals rarely can, because it’s baked right into everything they say and do. Ephesus is a reminder that no matter how humble you are, you are probably not humble enough.
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Scandals, Romans, and jacuzzis” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]