Library of Celsus

Every guide in Selcuk has watched it happen a thousand times: guests walk down Curetes Street chatting, turn the last corner, and go quiet. The Library of Celsus does that to people. It did it to the Romans too — the architects designed the surrounding streets so the facade reveals itself all at once.

Who built the Library of Celsus?

So the name on the building is the father's, and the money was the son's. Celsus was born around AD 45 into a Greek family from Sardis or from Ephesus itself, became a Roman consul in AD 92 and came back to govern all of Asia in 105–106. That career mattered to Ephesians: he was one of the first men from this coast to reach the very top of the empire, and his son, Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus (consul in AD 110), wanted the city to remember it.

Aquila never saw the doors open. An inscription on the building records that his heirs finished the work, even drawing 2,000 denarii from the library's own book fund to do it, and the library opened under the emperor Hadrian. Neither the man it honors nor the man who paid for it lived to walk into the reading room.

And here is the detail we love telling on tour: Celsus is still in there. A marble sarcophagus rests in a crypt beneath the library floor — an almost unheard-of honor, since Romans buried their dead outside the city walls. The most famous library facade on earth is, quietly, a tomb. On our Best of Ephesus tour a licensed guide reads the building's inscriptions with you, with skip-the-line entry at the gate (the ticket itself is paid separately, at the Ministry price).

A building full of clever tricks

The two-story facade plays games with your eyes. The columns at the edges are slightly slimmer and their capitals slightly smaller than those at the center, which makes the building look bigger than it is — Roman perspective trickery, seventeen centuries before Photoshop. The whole structure faces east, so morning sun poured into the reading room at the hours scholars actually worked. It still works: come before nine and the marble glows.

Four statues stand in the niches between the doors — Sophia, Arete, Ennoia and Episteme: Wisdom, Virtue, Thought and Knowledge, the qualities Celsus supposedly embodied. The ones you see are faithful copies; the originals were carried off to Vienna a century ago, a sore point locals will happily elaborate on if you ask.

Burned, buried, and rebuilt

The interior burned in AD 262, the year an earthquake and Gothic raiders both struck Ephesus — some 12,000 scrolls, the third-greatest collection of the ancient world after Alexandria and Pergamon, went up in flames, and nobody can say whether the quake or the raiders started the fire. Earthquakes eventually threw the facade down as well, and for centuries it lay in pieces exactly where it fell. That turned out to be a blessing: between 1970 and 1978 archaeologists reassembled the original stones like a giant puzzle — a technique called anastylosis. What you photograph today is not a replica; it is the actual building, stood back up.

Immediately beside the library rises the Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates, built by two freed slaves for the Emperor Augustus, and through it lies the Commercial Agora. Give yourself time here — and if you want the square nearly empty, ask us about early-gate timing. It is the single most common request we get, and the one we are best at.