The Decline of Ephesus

Every visitor eventually asks the same question among the ruins: what happened? How does a city of 250,000 — the second metropolis of the Roman Empire — become a field of marble? The answer took a thousand years, and its chief villain is not an army but a river.

The blows begin: AD 262

In AD 262 the Goths sacked Ephesus and destroyed the Temple of Artemis along with much of the city. Restoration followed, but Ephesus never fully regained its splendor. The library burned; the wonder of the world lost its roof; and the city's confidence, contemporaries suggest, never quite recovered.

A new faith, a new capital

The Byzantine era rearranged the world Ephesus had thrived in. Constantine the Great made Christianity the empire's official religion and moved the capital to Constantinople — leaving Ephesus, already struggling with silt accumulating in its harbor, increasingly to fend for itself. Under Emperor Theodosius the transformation turned severe: freedom of the old worship was banned, temples and schools were closed, and the Temple of Artemis was dismantled, its stones quarried to build Christian churches.

Yet the city found a second life in faith itself. In AD 431 the Third Ecumenical Council met in the Church of Saint Mary here and confirmed the Virgin Mary as Theotokos — Mother of God. Pilgrims replaced merchants; the city's iconic places of worship became its economy.

The harbor loses its war

But Ephesus was a port city with a deteriorating harbor, and there was only so much that could be done to keep it — literally — afloat. The Cayster river fed silt into the bay faster than dredging could remove it; the sea retreated kilometer by kilometer until ships could no longer reach the greatest docks in Asia. In the sixth and seventh centuries a massive earthquake and the harbor's final decline reduced Ephesus to a shell, and Arab raids drove most of the remaining population to the safety of Ayasuluk Hill — where the story had begun two thousand years earlier.

Last flickers

The Seljuk Turks brought a brief, bright revival in the fourteenth century — the Isa Bey Mosque is its lovely evidence — before the Ottoman Empire took final control in the fifteenth. By then the harbor was practically useless, and by the century's end Ephesus was abandoned: its legacy left to archaeologists, historians and the millions of visitors who now flock to see what a great city looks like when time is allowed to keep all of it.

Today, standing at the harbor gate, you can look across seven kilometers of farmland to the glinting Aegean — the exact measure of the mud that killed a metropolis.