Aegean
A facade, a street, and a buried harbour
Ephesus is Türkiye’s single most-visited ancient site, a Roman-era metropolis you walk downhill through rather than a monument you photograph once. Base yourself in Selçuk, not Kuşadası — nearly everything that matters, including the museum that explains the ruins, is here. Go for the gate at 08:00: cruise coaches fill the site from mid-morning, and the marble gives back the heat all afternoon.
Every published place in one city guide
Start with the essentials, add what genuinely interests you, and leave the rest for another visit. Every place includes a concise story, practical timing, a Maps link, and a one-tap route planner action.
Make the route work
Base yourself in Selçuk. The nearest airport is İzmir Adnan Menderes (ADB), roughly an hour by road or by a direct train and transfer; intercity buses also connect İzmir to Selçuk. Many visitors instead arrive on a cruise call at nearby Kuşadası — if you do, expect the site to fill with ship groups from mid-morning.
The site runs downhill from south to north: enter at the upper (south) gate, walk down, and leave by the lower (north) gate — gravity works with you and the city unfolds in the order it was built to be seen. The two gates sit about 3km apart by road and no dolmuş reaches the upper gate, so take a taxi there from Selçuk and a dolmuş back from the lower gate.
Carry a payment card and some Turkish lira. The Terrace Houses need a separate ticket on top of Ephesus admission — museum passes do not cover it — so confirm current prices at the gate rather than an older guide.
Mobile coverage is reliable in Selçuk and across the archaeological site. It can weaken on the back road up to the House of the Virgin Mary, so download offline maps before that trip.
İsa Bey Mosque and the House of the Virgin Mary are active places of worship — dress modestly and time visits around prayer where relevant. Don't sit on the public latrines' marble seats for photographs, and respect fenced-off areas; several are closed for genuine safety or conservation reasons, not bureaucracy.
There is almost no shade on the main route, and the marble reflects the heat back — recorded summer maxima reach the low 40s°C, so carry water and start early. The Cave of the Seven Sleepers and the Great Theatre interior are fenced for real safety reasons; do not climb in through a gap.
Essential
If you only have one day, this is the day.
The facade is real stone, reassembled from its own fallen fragments in the 1970s. Everything behind it is still ruin.
Begun about AD 110 by Tiberius Julius Aquila as a monument and tomb for his father, the proconsul Celsus Polemaeanus, whose sarcophagus still lies in a vault beneath the reading room. It held some twelve thousand scrolls. Fire gutted the interior in AD 262 and an earthquake felled the front. Volker Michael Strocka rebuilt the facade between 1970 and 1978 from fragments Austrian excavators recovered in 1903–04.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40).
The largest theatre of the ancient world — and since April 2025 you have been looking at it from the agora, not sitting in it.
Cut into the slope of Panayır Dağı in the Hellenistic period and enlarged under the Romans into a bowl of sixty-six rows in three tiers, fronted by a stage building three storeys and eighteen metres high. In Acts 19 the silversmith Demetrius, whose trade was shrines of Artemis, drove a mob here chanting against Paul until the town clerk broke it up.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40).
Roofed, shaded and comparatively empty — the only part of Ephesus with a ceiling, and the only part behind a second ticket.
Six terraced houses on the slope facing the Temple of Hadrian, built from about 200 BC on Hellenistic terracing and occupied by wealthy Ephesians from the first century BC into the seventh AD. Two blocks have been excavated. They hold the largest body of Roman floor mosaic in western Türkiye, and frescoes of Apollo, the Muses and Socrates painted directly onto the plaster of ordinary rooms.
Separate €15 ticket on top of the €40 site entry — there is no combined ticket. Discounted to 200 TL for MüzeKart holders.
The 210-metre marble spine of the city. Walk it downhill and Ephesus makes sense; walk it uphill and it is just a slog.
The processional street between the Hercules Gate and Triodos Square by the library, 210 metres long and 6.8 to 10 metres wide, dropping about 20 metres. Paved in marble in the Roman period over the city's drainage system. From the fourth century AD the Hercules Gate narrowed the top end so that wheeled traffic could no longer pass, and the street became a pedestrian promenade.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40 for foreign visitors, card or Turkish lira only — euro cash is not accepted at the gate).
Worth your time
A second day earns you these.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is now one column in a wet field. Go anyway, but go knowing that.
Antipater of Sidon ranked it above every other wonder he had seen. Rebuilt three times, the last version begun about 323 BC and standing some six centuries before it was destroyed in AD 401. Its stone was quarried away for later buildings. The best surviving sculpture was carried to the British Museum in the nineteenth century and sits in its Ephesus room.
Free; open site, no gate.
A small stone chapel on Bülbül Dağı that three popes have visited and that Muslims and Christians venerate together.
Found in 1881 by the French priest Julien Gouyet, working from the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a bedridden German nun who had never been to Anatolia and whose descriptions were published in 1852. Rome declared it a Holy Place in 1951 but has never ruled on whether Mary lived here. Paul VI came in 1967, John Paul II in 1979, Benedict XVI in 2006.
700 TL per person, card payment only. Privately run — not a state site, and NOT covered by MüzeKart or the Aegean pass.
Everything portable that was lifted off Curetes Street ended up here, indoors, a short walk from where it stood.
Selçuk's museum holds the movable finds from more than a century of excavation at Ephesus, arranged by where they were found rather than by date. It closed for rebuilding in 2012 and reopened in December 2014 with new galleries and bilingual labelling.
Ticketed; €10 for foreign visitors. MüzeKart valid; covered by the Aegean pass.
Justinian built a cathedral over what Ephesus believed was the grave of John the Evangelist. The grave was empty.
A domed cruciform basilica raised by Justinian from about 535 over an earlier shrine on Ayasuluk Hill, and among the largest churches of its age. Its scale drew pilgrims for centuries. It fell into ruin after earthquakes and the Turkish conquest; partial rebuilding of the walls and columns was funded from the United States after 1923.
Ticketed; €6 for foreign visitors, as part of Ayasuluk–St John site. MüzeKart valid.
If you have longer
Keep these compact stops in mind when you build your trip.
Called Çirkince, 'ugly', until 1926, reportedly so its Greek Orthodox inhabitants would keep outsiders away. The population was exchanged to Greece in 1923 and Muslims arriving from Greece took their place. Around 456 people live here now, in stone and plaster houses that are a rare survival of Ottoman Christian village building.
Free; village, no gate. Individual museums and tastings charge separately.
Dedicated by P. Quintilius Valens Varius with his wife and daughter. Long dated to AD 130–132, when Hadrian granted Ephesus a temple in his name; recent reading of the dedicatory inscription pushes it back to about AD 117–119. Found in 1956, re-erected over the next two years, conserved again between 2012 and 2014.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40 for foreign visitors, card or Turkish lira only — euro cash is not accepted at the gate).
Built about AD 150 by Publius Vedius Antoninus at the north edge of the State Agora, beside the Prytaneion where the city's sacred fire burned. Seating for roughly 1,400 to 1,500, roofed, and used both as the council house and for recitals. It collapsed in a fourth-century earthquake and its marble seats were carted off for other buildings.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40 for foreign visitors, card or Turkish lira only — euro cash is not accepted at the gate).
A Byzantine fortress raised after the seventh-century Arab raids to protect the basilica below, then rebuilt by the Aydinids and the Ottomans using stone stripped from Ephesus and other abandoned sites. The hill beneath it holds settlement layers back to the late Chalcolithic, and a Bronze Age town thought to be Apasa.
Ticketed; €6 for foreign visitors, one ticket covering the hill, the castle, and Basilica of St John. MüzeKart valid; the castle itself has no separate charge beyond this entry.
Commissioned by the Aydinid ruler İsa Bey in 1374–75 and built by the Damascene architect Ali bin Mushaimish al-Dimashqi, who looked to the Great Mosque of Damascus. It fell out of use, served as a caravanserai, was in ruins by 1829 and lost its minaret in 1842. Later restoration brought it back.
Free; working mosque. Modest dress required; avoid prayer times.
Built in the first century AD as part of the Scholastica Baths, which fed it grey water for continuous flushing and, in winter, warm air from the bath furnaces. Forty-eight seats ran along three sides around an open pool that caught rainwater. A wooden roof on columns kept the rain off. Users were largely the wealthy, carrying on bathhouse conversation.
No separate ticket; inside the Ephesus site (€40 for foreign visitors, card or Turkish lira only — euro cash is not accepted at the gate).
A Byzantine necropolis of several hundred graves from the fifth and sixth centuries AD, cut into the flank of Panayır Dağı with a rock church among them. The legend attached to it — seven young Christians walled up and waking centuries later — is told in both Christian tradition and the Qur'an, where they are the Companions of the Cave.
Free; fenced, viewed through railings — no entry inside the caves.
Getting there and away
Door-to-door times and fare ranges, checked leg by leg. Only routes where every leg verified are listed.
Türkiye, for scale
See this city in the wider shape of Türkiye.