An hour south of Ephesus lies the city that taught the Greeks to trade, to colonize and — historians of ideas insist — to think. Miletus was the greatest port of Ionia, so rich from its harbors and colonies that its merchants reached the coasts of modern Ukraine and Russia.
Its most valuable export was rational thought. Thales of Miletus predicted a solar eclipse, measured pyramids by their shadows and proposed that nature could be explained without myths — earning the title of the first philosopher. His students Anaximander and Anaximenes continued the school; a local named Hippodamus invented the city grid plan; and Isidore of Miletus later co-designed Hagia Sophia. Not bad for one address.
The ruins today
The centerpiece is the theater: 15,000 seats of grey marble rising from the plain, with vaulted entrance galleries you can walk and, on the lower rows, inscribed seat reservations for the city's notables — including, intriguingly for Biblical travelers, a marked place "for the God-fearers." The Baths of Faustina, the harbor monument and the council house fill out a site that is blissfully uncrowded; you will often have the theater's upper rows to yourself.
The city's fate is the region's recurring tragedy: the Meander river silted all four harbors until Miletus, port of philosophers, stood landlocked; a fourth-century earthquake finished the argument. Standing in the theater and trying to see the vanished sea is one of the great imaginative exercises Turkey offers — the same story told in our article on the decline of Ephesus.