Halfway down Curetes Street, the Temple of Hadrian is the building everyone photographs second. It is not large — a porch, an arch, a cella — but it is the most gracefully theatrical piece of architecture in the city, and it carries more meaning per square meter of marble than anything around it.
A note on the name, because it trips people up: the street the temple faces is Curetes Street, and the stretch of it outside the temple is sometimes called “Hadrian’s Way” by visitors and guidebooks. There is no separate road of that name at Ephesus — if you are looking for Hadrian’s Way, you are looking at Curetes Street, and the temple is halfway down it.
Hadrian, the great traveling emperor, visited Ephesus more than once, and the city — never slow to flatter power usefully — dedicated this temple to him in the years around AD 130. It faces the street like a stage set, which in a sense it was: an announcement, to everyone walking the main avenue, of the city’s special relationship with the throne.
Two faces over two arches
The outer arch carries Tyche, goddess of fortune and protector of the city — good luck, welcoming you in. Step under the porch and the inner door’s lunette answers with Medusa, rising out of acanthus leaves — a guardian whose stone gaze turned away evil. Fortune outside, protection inside: the whole ancient theory of a doorway, in two carvings.
The curved arch itself is a small engineering flourish — a syrian-style arch springing directly from the architrave — and the reason the little building photographs like a much grander one.
The city’s origin story, in stone
Around the porch runs a frieze telling the founding legend: Androclos, son of the Athenian king, consulting the oracle and being told a fish and a boar would show him where to build; the fish leaping from the fire, the boar bolting from the brush, the prince giving chase — and Ephesus rising where the boar fell. Gods, Amazons and emperors fill out the panels. What you see on the building are precise casts; the originals, protected from acid rain, are displayed in the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk, ten minutes away.
What you photograph on the porch today are casts: the original frieze blocks were lifted for safekeeping and now hang on a museum wall in Selçuk, ten minutes away, where you can read the carving at eye level and out of the sun.
