Efes

The shore moved; the city followed

The old harbour of Ephesus now lies inland. Sediment built up at the mouth of the Kaystros, pushing the shoreline west; settlements and harbours shifted with it. The city's story follows that moving edge rather than a single fixed centre.

From Çukuriçi to Ayasuluk

The sequence reaches back to Çukuriçi Mound in the seventh millennium BCE, on the southern edge of the former estuary and now well inland. After that settlement was abandoned, habitation moved to Ayasuluk Hill in the Middle Bronze Age. In the fourth century BCE, Lysimachus founded a new Ephesus, leaving the older city around the Artemision. A change in shoreline was also a change in where people lived.

Channels, harbours, and sediment

The Roman sea channel and harbour basin mark one stage in this coastal history. As sediment altered the estuary, the city and ports changed too. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015, Ephesus is recognized as a Roman harbour city shaped by that landscape.

Painted walls and traces of use

Terrace House 2 brings the story to household scale: seven homes on three terraces within a 4,000-square-metre block. Its wall paintings preserve layers of repainting, graffiti and dipinti. Most fire damage and distortion are linked to the late third-century earthquake sequence. A protective structure was built in 2000; a 2023 conservation article described cleaning and stabilizing the surfaces without additions or reconstruction.

A settlement landscape around Selçuk

Within present-day Selçuk, the Basilica of St John stands on Ayasuluk Hill, while the Church of Mary lies within Ephesus. The Church of Mary is a different building from the House of the Virgin Mary.

Connected stops

• Smyrna
• Teos
• Miletos

Stories that include this stop

• The memory of a harbour: Smyrna
• A peninsula of oracle and production

Sources

• UNESCO · Ephesus
• OeAW · Terrace House 2 fresco conservation