Stand before the Library of Celsus at opening hour

One of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean, with a two-storey library facade, a theatre that held twenty-five thousand, and terrace houses whose frescoes and mosaics survive under cover.

The library was finished around AD 117 as a monument and tomb for Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, a Roman senator buried in a crypt beneath it. It held perhaps twelve thousand scrolls. The facade uses the same trick as the Parthenon — the base curves and the central columns are larger — to make it look bigger than it is.

The Great Theatre is the largest in Türkiye, cut into the hillside and still acoustically effective. Marble-paved Curetes Street runs down between them past the Temple of Hadrian, the public latrines and the fountains.

The Terrace Houses are the part people skip and should not. Under a modern roof, the homes of wealthy Ephesians survive with wall frescoes and floor mosaics largely intact, giving you domestic interiors rather than civic monuments.