The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was, for several centuries, one of the most spectacular religious buildings on earth. Antipater of Sidon put it on his list of Seven Wonders in the second century BC and wrote that beside it the other six lost their shine. Today a single reconstructed column stands on the marsh at the edge of Selçuk, twenty-two minutes from the Kuşadası cruise berth, and the question every guest asks is the honest one: is one column worth stopping for? Our answer, and the reason it stays on our routes, is below.
Four temples, one address
The site holds the memory of at least four buildings stacked on the same sacred ground: an eighth-century BC altar to the mother goddess, the marble colossus of about 560 BC that Antipater praised, the temple burned down by an arsonist named Herostratus in 356 BC, allegedly on the very night Alexander the Great was born, and the rebuild that followed, which stood until the Goths sacked Ephesus in 268 AD. Herostratus torched the wonder purely so his name would be remembered; the Ephesians banned speaking it, which is why you have heard of it. Guides have been telling that story on this spot for two thousand years and it has not worn out.
The column and its tenants
The lone column was assembled from recovered drums to mark the temple's position and height, and the marsh birds moved in almost immediately. A stork pair nests on the capital in season, storks stalk the reed beds below, and the film at the top of this page, made from our own photograph, catches the nest with its tenant in residence. Guests who came for archaeology tend to leave talking about the birds, and we have made our peace with that.
The best frame in Selçuk
Stand with the column in the foreground and the modern town gives you the rest of the shot for free: the Byzantine fortress along the ridge of Ayasuluk Hill, the brick arches of the Basilica of St. John on its slope, and the minaret of the fourteenth-century İsa Bey Mosque between them. A pagan wonder, an apostle's church and a Seljuk mosque in one photograph: it is the densest history-per-pixel view on the whole route, and it costs a fifteen-minute stop.
How it fits a port day
The Temple is a fifteen-to-twenty-minute visit, not a destination, and we plan it as punctuation rather than a chapter: the natural pause between Ephesus and the House of the Virgin Mary, or the short detour on the road back to the ship, or the foreground of the St. John visit up the hill. On our tours it costs nothing extra in time worth counting, and it hands you the one photograph nobody else's cruise day has.
Written by the Tours of Ephesus operations team, who pass this column most working days in season. No content lifted from third-party sources.
