Between 12,000 and 15,000 scrolls were kept in the Library of Celsus — enough to make it the third greatest library of the ancient world, behind only Alexandria and Pergamon. But the building is stranger and more touching than a library: it is also a tomb.
Celsus Polemaeanus was a local success story on an imperial scale: a Greek from Asia Minor who rose through the Roman Senate to govern the very province he came from. When he died, his son, Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, began this library as his father’s memorial, starting around AD 110. Roman law kept burials outside the city walls — but for Celsus an exception was granted, and he was laid in a lead coffin inside a marble sarcophagus, in a vault beneath the ground floor. Readers upstairs, founder below: the most dignified permanent residency in history.
The trick in the façade
Stand squarely in front of the façade and look carefully: the columns at the edges are slightly shorter and thinner than those at the center, and the platform curves almost imperceptibly. It is a deliberate optical illusion — the architects bent the geometry so the building would look larger and more monumental than the narrow plaza allows. Two thousand years later, every wide-angle photograph proves it still works.
The niches between the doors held statues of the four virtues claimed for Celsus — Wisdom (Sophia), Knowledge (Episteme), Intelligence (Ennoia) and Virtue (Arete). The originals were carried off to Vienna in the excavation era, where they stand in the Ephesos Museum; the figures you see here are faithful copies.
Destruction and resurrection
An earthquake — and, in most tellings, an accompanying fire during the Gothic troubles around AD 262–270 — gutted the library, and it was never rebuilt as one. The façade outlived the reading room by centuries. Around AD 400 the burnt shell was turned into a fountain: water ran down the great staircase, and the carved front stood behind the basin as its backdrop. Only later, most likely in another earthquake, did the front itself come down, and Austrian excavators dug its fallen pieces out of the ground in 1903 and 1904.
Is the Library of Celsus original or rebuilt?
Both. The façade you see is a 1970–1978 re-erection, but it was rebuilt from its own stones: archaeologists cataloged about 750 fallen pieces and set each one back where it belonged, adding new material only where pieces were missing. The reading room behind it was never rebuilt, which is why you see sky through the upper windows.
Before 1970 it did not look like a library at all. The excavators of 1903–04 found the great staircase, the surviving walls of the hall and a field of carved marble, and the architect Wilhelm Wilberg put the façade back together on paper in 1908. By the 1960s its pieces lay scattered around the site, some as far away as İzmir. From 1967 the archaeologist Volker Michael Strocka documented them, and between 1970 and 1978 he and the Viennese architect Friedmund Hueber stood the front back up, piece by piece, with conservators, students and Turkish workers, a German building firm lending the crane and Austrian businesses helping to pay for it. The method is called anastylosis. The side walls of the hall were raised a little in new brick and the missing floor was filled in with artificial stone, so the seams between Roman and modern are there to be read once someone points them out; it is one of the things worth asking your guide about on a half-day Ephesus tour. Who dug what, and when, is set out in how much of Ephesus has been excavated.
Why the rebuilt façade is being rescued again
Fifty years on, the rebuild itself needs care. In October 2024 a team of architects, conservators and structural engineers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences inventoried the façade and recorded cracks, flaking and “sugaring”, where the surface of the marble breaks down into loose, sugar-like grains. They carried out the first safeguarding work and scaffolded part of the front to take samples. The full conservation program is scheduled to finish by the end of 2027, so a visit before then may include some scaffolding.
There is reassuring news too. The magnitude 6.9 earthquake of 30 October 2020 in the eastern Aegean gave engineers a test nobody could have planned, and a 2022 study in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, built on material samples taken at Ephesus, found that the reconstructed library came through it well, helped by the way the façade and its side walls hold each other up.
Seeing it well
Give the façade ten unhurried minutes, then walk through it — the reading room behind reveals the double-wall system that kept damp away from the scrolls. The Mazaeus and Mithridates Gate beside it, built by two grateful freed slaves, is the finest doorway in the city and most visitors sweep past it. The Terrace Houses entrance is sixty seconds away, which is why our Terrace Houses tour treats the two as one visit.
