Ancient travelers who had seen all Seven Wonders kept a private ranking, and more than one of them put the Artemision first — above the pyramids. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was the largest building of the Greek world when it rose: some 115 meters by 55, a forest of 127 marble columns, the first colossal temple ever attempted entirely in marble.
It was less a building than an institution. The sanctuary held treasure like a national bank (kings deposited fortunes under the goddess’s protection), granted asylum that even armies respected — usually — and pulled pilgrims from three continents to the festivals of the great mother-goddess of Anatolia, whom the Greeks called Artemis and dressed in their own mythology. Croesus of Lydia funded columns of the archaic temple; his name survives on a column drum in the British Museum.
The man who burned it for fame
In 356 BC a man named Herostratus set fire to the temple’s roof timbers for one recorded reason: to be remembered. The Ephesians executed him and outlawed his name — which, as you notice, is how we know it. Legend adds that the temple burned the very night Alexander the Great was born, Artemis being away attending the delivery; Alexander later offered to fund the rebuild, and the Ephesians declined with the most diplomatic sentence in Greek history — that it was not fitting for one god to build a temple to another.
The rebuilt temple — grander still — stood through the classical centuries until Gothic raiders sacked it in AD 262. As the old faith faded, the marble migrated: into Ephesian buildings, into lime kilns, and — persistent tradition holds — into columns of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. A wonder of the world, recycled by the cartload.
Who discovered the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus?
John Turtle Wood, an English railway architect digging for the British Museum, found it on 31 December 1869 after six years of searching. A theater inscription pointed him to the road from the Magnesian Gate, and he followed it to the temple, buried under about 20 feet of silt.
The whole hunt, from the railway stations he had come to build to the first trenches that turned up nothing, is told in how much of Ephesus has been excavated. The British Museum sent D. G. Hogarth back in 1904–05, and he dug below Wood’s temple into the earliest sanctuary, recovering 95 electrum coins of the seventh century BC, among the earliest coins ever found anywhere. Austrian archaeologists under Anton Bammer found the temple’s great altar in 1965 and went on working here for decades.
Visiting the site
The Artemision lies on Selçuk’s edge, ten minutes from the Ephesus gates. Entrance to the Temple of Artemis is included in our tours. Come with your imagination switched on: the ground plan reads in the marsh grass, the Ayasuluk fortress and İsa Bey Mosque stack behind the column, and the scale of what is absent is precisely the experience. The great statues of the goddess wait in the Ephesus Museum across town; the two visits belong together.
