Every great city has a birthplace, and for Ephesus it is this hill. Ayasuluk was called Apasas in the oldest records — the original Ephesus of the prehistoric and Ionic periods, settled continuously until King Croesus of Lydia moved the population down to the plain by the Artemision around 560 BC.
The city would move again when its harbor silted, and when Lysimachus — one of Alexander the Great's commanders — founded the Hellenistic and Roman Ephesus visitors walk today, Ayasuluk Hill faded into a venerable retirement. But the digs begun here in 1990 keep pushing the story back: beneath the medieval walls, archaeologists have found fortifications older than the Ephesian settlement itself, reaching to the Neolithic age.
The fortress today
The partially restored fortress crowning the hill dates mainly from the Byzantine era, patched and reused by Seljuks and Ottomans — its walls a masonry diary of everyone who ever needed this vantage point. Inside are a small mosque, a chapel and cisterns; around the ramparts runs the finest view in the region: Selcuk's red roofs, the basilica terraces below, the lone column of the Artemis temple, storks on every worthy pinnacle and, on a clear day, the Aegean shining beyond the plain that used to be the sea.
Visit it together with the Basilica of Saint John — one ticket path climbs both — ideally in late afternoon, when the light turns the stone honey-gold and the swifts take over the ramparts.