
We took the train from Izmir to Selçuk, to visit the ancient city of Ephesus. We hadn’t heard of it before even though my dad told me Ephesus is mentioned in the Bible as one of the seven churches in Asia. Apparently St. John the Baptist spent quite some time preaching and converting people here and it was thought that the Book of St. John was written here.
Walking through the huge archaeological site, I couldn’t help but noticed the dissonance between the apparent past grandeur of the city and its current state – abandoned piles of rubbles. And unlike mining ghost towns that at most support a few hundred people in their heyday, Ephesus was an illustrious city with administrative centers (agoras), multiple bathhouses, a wealthy neighborhood, an advanced aqueduct system, a military barrack, and an impressive colonnade that went all the way to the harbor. The Celsus library had stored a large collection of scrolls. The amphitheatre could contain 25,000 spectators – thought to be the largest in ancient world. The list of past accomplishments goes on and on. And one can see evidence of this just walking through the expansive site. This was not an ancient village of a hundred people. Ephesus was a proper metropolis, until it was not.
How strange to think that a city could go from a major city of the world to a pile of rubbles in a span of a few generations. First it was ransacked by the Goths, though it seemed that it was economic reason that slowly brought it to its knees. As the river silted up the harbor, commerce – and along with it, people – moved to other cities closer to the sea until there was no more city to speak of. I wonder at what point cartographers decided to omit Ephesus from the map?
Still musing about the fate of Ephesus, we walked a few kilometers to the Temple of Artemis, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Pliny had written that the temple used to stand at 400ft (130m) tall; a feat of engineering at the time it was built. I had expected to see a smaller version of the Temple of Athena we saw in Athens and was confused upon seeing an empty field of grass. Are we in the right place? Were we supposed to go further into the bushes? It turned out, that was all that’s left of this ancient wonder. There isn’t even a column standing as most of the column blocks had been repurposed in other buildings. If there was no plaque to mark the site, it would have been forgotten.
I suppose these were good reminders that nothing lasts forever. Not even the most advanced building, an illustrious metropolis, nor an advanced civilization. Nothing is permanent.