What happened to Ephesus was a slow emptying, not one disaster: river silt choked its harbor, earthquakes and a Gothic raid in the 260s AD broke its great buildings, malaria and Arab raids drove the survivors up onto Ayasuluk Hill, and by the 1400s the old marble city stood empty. Its people did not vanish. They moved less than 3 kilometers (2 miles) north-east, to the hill where the town of Selçuk stands today.
Why was Ephesus abandoned?
Ephesus was abandoned because it lost everything a port city lives on. River silt closed its harbor, earthquakes and raiders wrecked its public buildings, marsh fever spread, and Arab fleets struck from 654 onward. Survivors moved up to Ayasuluk Hill, and by the 15th century the lower city was empty.
What happened to Ephesus, cause by cause
So why did Ephesus fall? Not to one blow, which is why there is no single date for when Ephesus was destroyed. The city rebuilt after nearly every disaster; it was the combination, repeated over centuries, that emptied it.
| Cause | When | What you can still see |
|---|---|---|
| The harbor silts up, and malaria follows | Fought from the 2nd century BC, never won | Harbor Street running into fields, seen from the Great Theater |
| Earthquakes | AD 262, later in the 3rd century, the 4th century | Mismatched columns on Curetes Street; the shattered marble of the Terrace Houses |
| The Gothic raid | The 260s AD | The single re-erected column of the Temple of Artemis |
| Fire and attack | AD 614/615 | Domitian Square, where the burnt shops were dug out in 2022 |
| Arab raids, and the move uphill | 654–655, 700, 716, 781 | The fortress and walls on Ayasuluk Hill, above the Basilica of St John |
| The Turkish centuries | 1304; the lower city empty by the 1400s | The İsa Bey Mosque of 1374–75, built with the old city’s marble |
1. A harbor that filled with mud
Ephesus lived on its harbor, and the harbor was always losing to the Küçük Menderes, the river the Greeks called the Cayster. Strabo records that King Attalus II of Pergamon narrowed the harbor mouth with a mole in the 2nd century BC, hoping for a deeper channel; instead the silt was trapped inside and the basin grew shallower. Rome kept paying to dredge it: Tacitus credits Nero’s governor Barea Soranus with clearing it, and early in the 2nd century the high priest Titus Flavius Montanus gave 75,000 denarii to enlarge it. The river still won. The old harbor now lies about 5 kilometers inland, and its marshes bred the malaria that killed many who stayed.
From the upper seats of the Great Theater, Harbor Street runs dead straight between its columns for about 500 meters, then stops at a line of trees and fields. That green ground was the harbor basin; our page on the ancient port of Ephesus follows the silting in full.
2. Earthquakes that broke the marble city
Ephesus sits in earthquake country. A great quake struck the region in AD 262; the Historia Augusta, a Roman collection of imperial lives, describes the earth opening and salt water welling up in the cracks. Another severe quake later in the 3rd century brought down the Terrace Houses, the rich homes on the slope above Curetes Street, and they were never rebuilt as homes. More damage followed in the 4th century. Each time the city recovered, a little more cheaply.
Walk down Curetes Street and look at the columns: fluted shafts beside plain ones, different heights, different stone. After the quakes of the 3rd and 4th centuries, fallen columns were replaced with others gathered around the city, among them drums from the Prytaneion, the town hall, carved with lists of the Curetes priests the street is named after. Under the Terrace Houses roof, marble wall panels that shattered when the houses fell lie on long tables, fragment by fragment.
3. The Goths and the Temple of Artemis
In the 260s, seaborne Gothic raiders swept the Aegean and plundered Ephesus. The 6th-century historian Jordanes says they burned the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Scholars still argue whether the raid came in 262 or in 267–268, and how much of that decade’s damage was theirs rather than the earthquake’s. The temple never regained its old glory, and in the Christian centuries it became a quarry for the Basilica of St John and, much later, for the İsa Bey Mosque.
Today a single column, pieced together from fragments, stands in a marshy hollow outside Selçuk, with the fortress, the basilica and the mosque built partly from its stone on the skyline behind it.
4. The fire of 614/615
Ephesus is still often said to have been wrecked by an earthquake in 614. Excavations in 2022 told a different story. Beside Domitian Square, archaeologists of the Austrian Academy of Sciences uncovered early Byzantine shops, among them a cookshop, a tavern and a shop selling lamps and pilgrim souvenirs, sealed under a thick layer of burning. No coin in them is later than 614/615, and arrowheads and spearheads point to an attack in the long war with Persia, not to an earthquake. The town that carried on afterward was a fraction of the Roman one.
5. Arab fleets, and the move up the hill
Arab fleets struck Ephesus in 654–655, more raids followed in 700 and 716, and in 781 a single raid carried off about 7,000 captives. A shrunken town on a malarial plain could no longer hold the old Roman walls. Life gathered on the fortified hill of Ayasuluk, around the Basilica of St John, raised by the emperor Justinian in the 6th century over the tomb believed to be the apostle’s. The hill town even took its name from him: Hagios Theologos, “the holy theologian”, which Turkish speakers later turned into Ayasuluk.
6. The Turkish centuries and the last of the lower city
By the time the Turkish emirates arrived, Ephesus was a hill town. On 24 October 1304 it surrendered to the Turkish warlord Sasa Bey, and in the 14th century, under the emirs of Aydın, it grew prosperous enough to build the İsa Bey Mosque in 1374–75. Like the Byzantines before them, its builders quarried the ruins: it was one of the first mosques in Anatolia faced with marble on such a scale, and its great granite columns probably came from a Roman bath-gymnasium below. Down on the plain the harbor quarter was left to the reeds, and by the 15th century the old city was completely abandoned.
Where the people of Ephesus went
So what happened to the city of Ephesus in the end? Its people moved, a little at a time, up the road to the hill town that kept the name Ayasuluk under the emirs and the Ottomans and became Selçuk in 1914. Nobody built over the lower city, and the river that strangled the port slowly buried its streets, which is a large part of why so much marble survived. How much of Ephesus has been excavated picks up that story, and our history of Ephesus puts every century in order.
Walking the story from the harbor to the hill
The marble streets of this story belong to the ancient city, and our stop-by-stop city tour route walks them from the upper gate to the theater. The ending belongs to Ayasuluk Hill, where our Saints, Sultans & Flavours day goes: the Basilica of St John under the fortress, the inside of the İsa Bey Mosque and the column of the Temple of Artemis, with every ticket in the price. It skips the marble streets, so for the whole arc pair it with a half-day Ephesus tour, where your guide holds priority tickets before you reach the gate and the entrance fee is paid separately, at the official price.
Sources & further reading
- Strabo, Geography 14.1.24 (Perseus, Tufts University) — the harbor mole of Attalus II
- Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) — Ephesos: area of the city discovered under a burnt layer (2022) — the fire of 614/615
- UNESCO World Heritage listing — Ephesus
- Britannica — Ephesus
- Bible Gateway — Revelation 2:1–7
