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.
When was Ephesus discovered?
Ephesus was never really lost, so it has no single discovery date. Its ruins stayed visible beside Selçuk through the Middle Ages and the Ottoman centuries. Excavation began in 1863, when John Turtle Wood started searching for the Temple of Artemis; he found it on 31 December 1869, and Austrian archaeologists began digging the city itself in 1895.
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 nearly three years and found almost nothing. The break came inside the theater in February 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. Otto Benndorf of the University of Vienna opened the Austrian excavation in 1895 and became the first director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute when it was founded in 1898, and Austrian teams have come back season after season ever since, with pauses for two world wars and one diplomatic dispute — 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.
Digging at Ephesus, decade by decade
| When | Who led the work | What came out of the ground |
|---|---|---|
| 1863–1874 | John Turtle Wood, for the British Museum | The theater inscription (1866), the processional road (1867) and the Temple of Artemis (31 December 1869) |
| 1895–1913 | Otto Benndorf, then the new Austrian Archaeological Institute | First trenches on Ayasuluk Hill; the fallen façade of the Library of Celsus uncovered in 1903–04 |
| 1904–1905 | D. G. Hogarth, for the British Museum | The earliest levels of the Artemision, with 95 electrum coins among the oldest coins known |
| 1926–1935 | Josef Keil | Work resumes after the First World War; the burial chamber of the Octagon is opened in 1929 |
| 1954–1959 | Franz Miltner | The street he named Curetes Street is cleared, the Temple of Hadrian stood back up (1957–58) and the first Terrace House rooms exposed |
| 1960s–1980s | Fritz Eichler, then Hermann Vetters | The Terrace Houses dug out, the great altar of the Artemision found (1965) and the Library of Celsus façade re-erected (1970–78) |
| 1995–2015 | Friedrich Krinzinger, then Sabine Ladstätter | Less new digging, more conservation and publication; Terrace House 2 opens under its roof (2006); UNESCO listing (2015) |
| 2016–2018 | Sabine Ladstätter | Work suspended by the Turkish authorities in September 2016 during a diplomatic dispute, and resumed in 2018 after a two-year break |
| 2020s | Sabine Ladstätter, then Martin Steskal | Early Byzantine shops and eating houses on Domitian Square, sealed by a fire of AD 614/615 (2022); conservation of the Library of Celsus façade begins (2024, due to finish by 2027); DNA shows the Octagon skull belonged to a boy of 11 to 14 (2025) |
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 can you see of the Ephesus ruins today?
The Ephesus ruins you actually walk through are a spine of excavated city, about a kilometer and a half long, running downhill between two gates. Standing on it, more or less upright, are the two-story façade of the Library of Celsus, the Great Theater with its 25,000 seats, the Temple of Hadrian, the Hercules Gate, the Fountain of Trajan, the Odeon and the frescoed Terrace Houses under their modern roof — plus the marble paving of Curetes Street, Marble Street and the Arcadian harbor road under your feet. That is the visible tenth.
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.
Why is Ephesus so well preserved?
Ephesus is so well preserved because no modern town was ever built on top of it. 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 north-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; how the city emptied, cause by cause, is told in what happened to Ephesus. Medieval builders carried off plenty of stone, but Ephesus was never bulldozed for houses. It was buried, slowly and gently, by a river. 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.
