Only about a tenth to a fifth of ancient Ephesus has ever been excavated — the figure most often quoted is 10 to 15 percent — even though archaeologists have been digging here almost every season since 1863. That is the short answer, and it reframes the whole visit. The marble streets and facades in everyone’s photographs are not the city. They are the excavated sliver of a city, and nearly all the rest of it is still lying under the fields, the scrub and the olive terraces on either side of the road you walk in on.
Why nobody can give you an exact number
Part of the honest answer is that “Ephesus” is not one place. The UNESCO World Heritage listing, inscribed in 2015, bundles several components together: a Neolithic mound at Çukuriçi, the long-occupied hill of Ayasuluk, the Roman city itself, and the House of the Virgin Mary up in the pines. Add the cemeteries outside the walls, the harbor plain that is now farmland, and the temple of artemis a couple of kilometers away, and the denominator shifts depending on who is counting. No excavating body publishes an official percentage, which is exactly why the figures you find online range from 10 to 20 percent. What nobody disputes is the order of magnitude. UNESCO’s own summary describes excavation and conservation stretching back over 150 years, and the work is nowhere near done.
How was Ephesus discovered?
By a railway architect who would not give up. John Turtle Wood had come to western Anatolia to build stations, and in 1863 he took a permit from the British Museum and began hunting for the temple that had been lost from view since the Middle Ages. He dug for six years and found almost nothing. The break came inside the theater in 1866, when he uncovered an inscription describing gold and silver statues carried in procession from the sanctuary into the city. If there had been a procession, there had been a processional road — and Wood reasoned it would leave town through the Magnesian Gate, the block of masonry in the photograph above. He found the road in 1867, followed it out across open country, and on the last day of 1869 finally struck the temple platform under roughly twenty feet of river silt. What survived of it went to London by ship.
When was Ephesus excavated, and by whom?
Wood’s dig was the beginning, not the story. Austrian teams took over in the 1890s and have worked here almost without a break ever since — long enough that an entire hall of the Ephesus Museum in Vienna is filled with what was shipped home before export rules changed. Today the excavation runs as a joint undertaking with the Turkish authorities, in a season of a few months a year, and the finds stay in the country. The pace is far slower than the old photographs suggest, because modern archaeology spends most of its time recording, consolidating and conserving rather than shifting soil: the library of celsus took years of piece-by-piece reassembly from its own fallen blocks. The terrace houses were dug between the 1960s and the 1980s and have been open to visitors under a purpose-built roof since 2006.
Everything you photograph at Ephesus came out of roughly a tenth of it. The other nine tenths is the hillside you are standing on.
What is still under the ground
A great deal, and some of it is enormous. Only the western end of the stadium of ephesus has been cleared — the rest of that huge oval is still a grassy bank that most visitors walk past without registering. The harbor works that made the city rich, the basins and quays and warehouses, lie under the flat ground west of the theater where the ancient port silted up and turned into a plain. A large market building opposite the stadium is reported to sit ten to twelve meters down. An exercise ground is presumed, but unexcavated, south of the State Agora baths. And the cemeteries beyond the walls keep producing surprises: the gladiator graveyard that changed what historians thought they knew about how those men lived, fought and were buried came out of necropolis work in 1993.
What happened to the city of Ephesus
The same process that ruined it is the one that preserved it. The river feeding the harbor kept filling it with silt, and no amount of dredging stayed ahead of the mud. As the water retreated the population drifted east and uphill toward Ayasuluk, and the old streets were left to be covered by the very sediment that had killed the port. The Goths sacked the place in 262 CE and it never recovered its former standing, but the real reason so much marble survived is that no modern town was ever built on top of it. Ephesus was not quarried away or bulldozed for houses. It was buried, slowly and gently, by a river — which is also the honest answer to why it is so well preserved. The full history of ephesus is worth reading alongside Britannica’s account of the city’s rise and fall.
Seeing the unexcavated city on the ground
This is where a guide genuinely adds something. Standing on the paved spine of the site is impressive on its own; standing at the edge of it and being shown where the stadium carries on under the grass, where the harbor road ran out into what is now a cotton field, and which of the green swellings on the slope are buildings nobody has opened yet — that changes your sense of the scale completely. Our stop-by-stop city tour route walks the excavated spine in order, and on a private ephesus tour there is time to stop at the quiet edges where the dig simply stops and the countryside starts. The terrace houses tour adds the one place where conservation is still visibly going on around you. Take as long as you like at each of them; nobody is ever hurried along.
