Between the ruins and Selçuk stands the circular footprint of a Roman building that Byzantine hands converted into a church — and that nineteenth-century explorers, finding a relief of a bull beside a cross, announced to the world as the tomb of St Luke the Evangelist. It was the kind of discovery an era in love with the Bible badly wanted.
The logic was charming: each evangelist carries a symbol — Matthew the man, Mark the lion, John the eagle, and Luke the ox or bull. A bull carved on a christianised tomb, in a city thick with apostolic memory? Case, surely, closed.
What scholarship says now
Gently: probably not. The structure began as a Roman monument — likely a fountain building or heroon — converted to a church centuries after Luke. The bull relief is real but reads as decoration or later addition rather than a burial marker, and the dominant tradition has always sent Luke’s body elsewhere: died in Greece, buried at Thebes, translated to Constantinople in 357, with Padua later claiming the relics. Ephesus’ claim rests on this one ambiguous carving — and on the very real possibility that Luke, companion of Paul, walked this city in life even if he never lay in it.
We keep the traditional name — the old site did too, and every local signpost agrees — but we tell you plainly what stands behind it. A site can be worth a visit for the question it asks rather than the answer it lacks.
