The
Temple of Artemis at Selçuk near Ephesus - Turkey.
As you can see from the map
left, (Click to see larger version), Ephesus is in the North West of Turkey. Driving to the site is quite easy
and worth doing if only to allow yourself the time to thoroughly view all the
ruins at your own pace. The Temple of Artemis is a few kilometres to the
north east in the town of Selçuk. There are no remains of the original Temple
of Artemis itself as
this was destroyed by fire and rebuilt no fewer than four times. So what was the
Temple like? The first shrine to the Goddess Artemis was built around
800 B.C. on a marshy strip near the river at Ephesus. The Ephesus Goddess
Artemis, sometimes called Diana, is not the same figure as the Artemis worshiped
in Greece. The Greek Artemis is the goddess of the hunt. The Ephesus Artemis was
a goddess of fertility and was often pictured as draped with eggs, or multiple
breasts, symbols of fertility, from her waist to her shoulders.
That earliest temple contained a sacred stone, probably a meteorite, that had
"fallen from Jupiter." The shrine was destroyed and rebuilt several times over
the next few hundred years. By 600 B.C., the city of Ephesus had become a major
port of trade and an architect named Chersiphron was engaged to build a new
large temple. He designed it with high stone columns. Concerned that carts
carrying the columns might get mired in the swampy ground around the site,
Chersiphron laid the columns on their sides and had them rolled to where they
would be erected.
This temple didn't last long. In 550 B.C. King Croesus of Lydia conquered
Ephesus and the other Greek cities of Asia Minor. During the fighting, the
temple was destroyed. Croesus proved himself a gracious winner, though, by
contributing generously to the building of a new temple.
This was next to the last of the great temples to Artemis in Ephesus and it
dwarfed those that had come before. The architect is thought to be a man named
Theodorus. Theodorus's temple was 300 feet in length and 150 feet wide with an
area four times the size of the temple before it. More
than one hundred stone
columns supported a massive roof.
There is a pit to the side of the road from Selçuk to Kuşadasi,
known locally as "the English pit", this is all that remains of the great Temple
of Artemis. You get a very eerie feeling as you stand at the side of it.
I revisited the Temple site in October 2003 and found little had changed since my last visit 3 years previous. The site is in a sorry state, neglected and with little information to help the interested visitors. Coach loads of tourists arrive and are given a very basic explanation of it's history which is sad in itself. I gazed in wonderment at what it must have looked like in all it's Glory...... Right - Am I really here?
Ephesus
is a wonderful place to visit with the Theatre, great Library,
Church
of St John who wrote his gospels here, St Paul also lived here for a number of
years as did the Virgin Mary whose house is set on the hillside above the Great
City. She spent her last days here after arriving with St John. Pope Paul IV
visited the house in 1967, so did I in 2000 with slightly less impact, click on the small picture
above left to see a larger version of
me stood outside the entrance to Mary's house.
This is a picture of me
in front of the Great Celsus Library which was built in 135AD. The library held
one of the largest collections of books in the world. If you look between the
second and third columns from the left you can see the statues of female figures
representing the virtues of wisdom, fate and intelligence. In the crypt below
the Library is the tomb of Celsus Palemaenus the governor of Asia Minor who was
the father of Consul Gaius Julius Aquila who built the library.
1 down 6 to go - my next wonder, the Colossus of Rhodes.....
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