Temple of Artemis

The Temple of Artemis stood on low, marshy ground below Ayasuluk Hill at Selcuk, in Turkey's Izmir province, a few kilometres from the ancient city of Ephesus. It was among the largest temples of the Greek world and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. What is there today is a field, some foundation courses and a single re-erected column. Almost everything else was burned, quarried or carried off, and the distance between what the site looks like and what once stood on it is the whole point of going.

Origins

The sanctuary is older than any of the buildings on it. Pausanias held that the cult site predated the Ionian settlement of the coast by many years, and Callimachus credited the first shrine to the Amazons. Excavation has found a sequence of earlier structures on the spot, rebuilt again and again after the river and the marsh flooded them.

The temple that made the site famous was begun around 550 BC, designed by the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes and paid for in part by Croesus, king of Lydia. It measured roughly 115 by 46 metres (377 by 151 feet) and was the first Greek temple built entirely of marble — an engineering problem in itself, since the column drums had to be hauled several kilometres and then set on waterlogged ground.

Fire, Rebuilding and Ruin

In 356 BC a man named Herostratus burned the temple down, by his own account so that his name would be remembered. The Ephesians rebuilt on the same site, larger than before, and turned down Alexander the Great's offer to pay for the work.

It is this fourth-century temple that Pliny the Elder described: 425 feet long and 225 feet wide, with 127 columns standing 60 feet high, some of them carved with figures around the base. In metric terms that is about 137 by 69 metres, with columns 18 metres tall. Antipater of Sidon, who compiled one of the earliest versions of the list of wonders, wrote that when he saw the temple the other six looked dim beside it.

A Gothic raid burned the building again in 268 AD. It was never restored to what it had been, and it was closed during the Christian period — perhaps as early as 407 AD, and no later than the middle of the fifth century. After that the marble was simply quarried away for later buildings in the area.

Excavation and What Was Found

The site was lost for centuries under river silt. John Turtle Wood, a British architect and engineer working for the British Museum, spent six years searching for it and located the temple in 1869; excavation continued until 1874. Later campaigns, including one led by David George Hogarth, dug deeper and reached the earlier sanctuaries underneath.

The finds include sculpted column drums, fragments of statuary, jewellery, ivory figurines and a deposit of electrum coins that are among the earliest coins known anywhere. Most of the sculptural material went to the British Museum, where the carved drums are on display. The rest, including the Roman-period statues of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, is in the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selcuk, a few minutes from the temple site.

The cult statue itself has not survived. Ancient writers disagree about the material — ebony and blackened grapewood are both recorded, and Pliny only says that it was wooden. What the Roman copies do show is how different the Ephesian Artemis was from the huntress worshipped elsewhere in the Greek world: rigid, frontal and heavily ornamented, a goddess of fertility whom the Romans called Diana.

Visiting the Site Today

The temple site sits beside the Selcuk–Kusadasi road, is free to enter and takes about twenty minutes to walk. One column stands there, assembled from surviving drums, in water for much of the year and usually topped with a stork's nest.

Nearly everyone combines it with the rest of Selcuk: the Basilica of St John and the fortress on Ayasuluk Hill, the Isa Bey Mosque of 1375, the Ephesus Archaeological Museum, and Ephesus itself three kilometres away, where the Library of Celsus and the Great Theatre are the main draws. The annual Selcuk Ephesus culture and art festival adds concerts, performances and exhibitions to the same sites.

Why It Still Matters

The Artemision belongs to a small group of colossal Ionic temples built along the Anatolian coast, alongside the Heraion of Samos and the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, and it was the largest of them. Its later reputation rests on the Seven Wonders list, which kept it in European education for centuries after the building had disappeared; the temple has been drawn, measured and reconstructed on paper far more often than it was ever seen standing. Kusadasi and the coast are about 20 kilometres west, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Turkey coast.