Before you visit a city, it is worth knowing what you are calling it. The name on your ticket — Efes in Turkish, Ephesus in English — has been pronounced in some form for well over three thousand years, and its origins reach past the Greeks into the Bronze Age.
From Apasa to Ephesos
The city's Ancient Greek name is written Ἔφεσος and read as Ephesos. But scholars now believe the word is older than Greek: it appears to derive ultimately from Apasa (or Abasa), the name of a Bronze Age capital of the kingdom of Arzawa recorded in Hittite documents — a city that stood in this very region, and which archaeology increasingly identifies with the earliest settlement on Ayasuluk Hill.
The Amazon queen
Tradition offers a more romantic layer. Many ancient authors claimed the city was named around the tenth century BC after Apasas, a warrior queen of the Amazons — the legendary nation of fighting women whom Greek storytellers loved to place in Anatolia. Over time this female name became entwined with the city's defining institution: the mother-goddess cult that the Greeks would call Artemis of Ephesus.
It is a fitting origin story. From the Amazon queen to the many-breasted Artemis to the Virgin Mary honored on the hill above town, the city's three millennia have been presided over, again and again, by powerful female figures. The name, whichever etymology you prefer, remembers a woman.
And "Selcuk"?
The modern town beside the ruins is named for the Seljuk Turks, whose 14th-century monuments — Isa Bey Mosque above all — still stand in its center. Locals use Efes and Selcuk almost interchangeably; when your guide says either, you are in the right place.
Sources & further reading
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Ephesus — the official World Heritage listing
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Ephesus — overview of the city's history
- Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University — ancient sources in Greek and translation