Atatürk, Park İçi Yolu No:12, 35920 Selçuk/Izmir, Turkey
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, or Artemision, also known as the Temple of Diana, is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a Greek temple dedicated to the local cult of the goddess Artemis (corresponding to the Roman goddess Diana). It was located in the Greek city of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, currently near the town of Selçuk in the south of İzmir Province, Turkey.
This lost masterpiece of the Ancient World, one of the largest Greek sanctuaries, was excavated in 1869 by British archaeologist John Wood after many years of searching and became accessible to all those interested in the wonders of antiquity. The ruins of the once magnificent structure are situated on the outskirts of the Turkish city of Selçuk and make a strong impression on travelers. Passing through Ephesus, I decided to definitely see the little that remains of the legendary building.
According to ancient Greek mythology, Artemis was the daughter of the goddess Leto (goddess of night, the night sky) and the amorous Zeus. Zeus’s lawful wife Hera, known for her "good-naturedness," decided to punish Leto for her husband's infidelity and for supporting the people of Troy in the Trojan War by strictly forbidding the earthly land to accept the birthing mother and forbidding the goddess of childbirth Ilithyia to be present at the birth. According to one version, Poseidon, at Zeus’s request, provided Leto with a place to give birth in the form of a floating island, which did not fall under the category of "earthly land," and after the birth, the island changed from mobile to stationary, known in history as Delos. The second version, based on the dating of events, seems more plausible. According to it, Leto gave birth to twins Artemis and Apollo in an olive grove near Ephesus thanks to Ilithyia, who violated Hera’s ban at the request of other gods.
Originally, Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. Over time, new spheres of responsibility were added, and Artemis became the protector of domestic animals. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the goddess’s activities had greatly expanded: protector of forests, fields, groves, morning dew, agriculture, fertility, and even medicine. Artemis was considered the ideal of female beauty among the Greeks. While in the Peloponnese she was depicted with a bow and arrows, in Ephesus she was portrayed as many-breasted with a crescent moon and star (only after seeing the statue of Artemis in Ephesus in person did I realize what those barrel-like objects hanging all over her body were...).
The cult of Artemis of Ephesus existed in Ephesus long before the city was founded by the Greeks and was established by the Carian tribes who had lived there since ancient times. Scholars propose the theory that at the dawn of Christianity, the cult of Artemis in Ephesus was gradually reorganized into the cult of the Virgin Mary. It is no coincidence that near the dismantled temple of Artemis, a temple of the Virgin Mary was built, and the very house where Mary spent her last days is located nine kilometers from Ephesus (the Bible does not clearly state where the Virgin Mary died, but there is a version that soon after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, she went to Ephesus, where she settled in a small house and passed away in 48 AD. The house has now been restored and is open to visitors).
The temple underwent several life cycles. The earliest version of the temple (temenos) dates back to the Bronze Age. The Alexandrian scholar and poet Callimachus, in his "Hymn to Artemis," attributed its construction to the Amazons. In the 7th century BCE, this temple was destroyed by a flood. Then, around 550 BCE, reconstruction began, or rather the construction of a new, much larger temple, led by the famous architect Chersiphron together with his son Metagenes. The construction of this temple lasted about two centuries and was completed around 380 BCE by architects Demetrius and Paeonius. In 356 BCE, the temple was burned down by Herostratus but was restored after some time. The last version of the temple, funded by Alexander the Great, is described in Antipater of Sidon’s work "Seven Wonders of the World":
On the night of July 21, 356 BCE, according to ancient historians, Artemis left her earthly residence in Ephesus and went to assist Olympias, who was preparing to give birth to the future ruler of the world, Alexander the Great. A common citizen of Ephesus, Herostratus, wishing to become famous, thought of nothing better than simply setting fire to the temple. Finding no one around, Herostratus successfully carried out his plan. Although the building itself was made of marble, the beams were wooden—cypress. First, the contents of the hall and temple storerooms caught fire, then the flames spread to the beams, and the roof collapsed. Artemis soon returned, and Herostratus was captured, tried, and executed. By court decision, the criminal’s name was to be forgotten, but the ancient Greek historian Theopompus, who moved to Ephesus in his old age, preserved this name as a warning for posterity.
The temple was located near the ancient city of Ephesus, about 75 kilometers south of the modern city of İzmir, Turkey. Today, it is on the outskirts of the town of Selçuk.
In the archaic period, three sanctuaries successively existed on the site of the future famous temple in Ephesus: from the 8th century BCE; mid-7th century BCE; a small temple with two columns in front of the entrance measuring 16×31 meters.
The exact date of the first sanctuary’s construction is difficult to estimate. The ancient Greek writer and geographer Pausanias (2nd century AD) believed that this temenos was older than the famous oracle of Apollo at Didyma, built around the 7th century BCE. According to Pausanias, the pre-Ionian inhabitants of Ephesus were the Leleges and Lydians. The Alexandrian scholar and poet Callimachus, in his "Hymn to Artemis," attributed the construction of the temenos in Ephesus to the Amazons, who worshipped Artemis as their patroness. Pausanias quoted poems by Pindar, who claimed that the temple’s founders—the Amazons—were connected with the siege of Athens, but Pausanias himself, unlike Tacitus, believed that the temple (temenos) appeared before the Amazons.
Modern archaeological excavations have not confirmed the existence of the Amazons mentioned by Callimachus but do not contradict Pausanias’s claims about the antiquity of this place. Excavations carried out here before World War I by British archaeologist David Hogarth allow the identification of remains of three sequentially constructed temple buildings. Excavations confirmed that as early as the Bronze Age, there was a temple with a clay floor built in the second half of the 8th century BCE. The temple in Ephesus was an example of a peripheral temple on the coast of Asia Minor and was possibly the earliest Greek peripteral temple. This temple was destroyed by a flood in the 7th century BCE, which deposited a layer of sand and debris more than half a meter thick over the original clay floor. Among the debris were fragments of bas-reliefs depicting griffins and the Tree of Life, apparently from northern Syria, as well as drilled amber ingots of elliptical cross-section. These were probably decorations of the xoanon of the Ephesian goddess, destroyed in the flood. According to Bammer’s assessment, although the temple site was flooded and between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE was covered with a 2-meter layer of silt deposits, and from the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE with a new 2.4-meter layer, further use of this site "indicates that preserving the identity of the actual location played an important role in sacred organization." Heraclitus of Ephesus (6th–5th centuries BCE) dedicated his work "On Nature" to the temple of Artemis.
The construction of the new temple was financed at least partially by Croesus, king of Lydia, who was ruler of Ephesus. The new temple project was developed around 550 BCE by the famous Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes. According to the project, the temple building was 115 meters long and 46 meters wide and was presumably the first Greek temple built of marble. The peripheral columns were 13 meters high and stood in two rows, forming a wide ceremonial passage around the cella, where the statue of Artemis was located. Thirty-six of these columns, according to Pliny, were decorated with carved bas-reliefs. Sculptor Endoios created a new statue of the goddess from ebony or blackened grapevine wood and naiskos, to place it east of the altar in the open air.
The construction of the second temple lasted about two centuries and was completed around 380 BCE by architects Demetrius and Paeonius.
The temple became an important attraction of Ephesus, visited by merchants, travelers, and rulers of states, many of whom brought offerings to Artemis in the form of jewelry and various goods. According to legends, the temple also served as a refuge for those fleeing persecution or punishment.
Analysis of fragments of bas-reliefs on the lowest drums of the temple columns, kept in the British Museum, showed that columns from the previous version of the building, properly decorated, were used in the construction of the second temple. Apparently, Pliny the Elder was unaware of this, as he claimed in his "Natural History" that the architects of the new temple decided to build it on marshy land as a precaution against earthquakes.
According to legend, in 356 BCE, on the night when the future Alexander the Great was born in Pella, the capital of Ancient Macedonia, a vain citizen of Ephesus named Herostratus set fire to the great temple, wishing to become famous this way. Plutarch wrote that Artemis was too busy with Alexander’s birth to save her temple. Since then, the name Herostratus has become proverbial and entered history, although by decision of the city assembly it was to be forgotten forever. Official documents refer to him simply as "a madman," but historian Theopompus, recounting Herostratus’s crime, thus preserved his name for posterity.
The most interesting thing is that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus became considered a "wonder of the world" not before the fire set by Herostratus, but after large-scale restoration work, as a result of which the temple became even bigger, taller, and more beautiful. Therefore, it is fair to call the temple not the Third but the Fourth Wonder of the Ancient World. This was thanks to the unprecedented generosity of Alexander the Great and the legendary cunning of the people of Ephesus.
In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great, during his victorious campaign against Persia, arrived in Ephesus, where he found the temple in a sad state. Having heard much about the beauty of the sanctuary, Alexander offered to restore the temple of Artemis at his own expense, but was refused by the inhabitants... The Greek population of the city perceived Alexander as a foreigner and barbarian from whom help should not be accepted, despite the fact that the Macedonian ruler had freed Ephesus from Persian oppression. Not to offend the king, they told him that they considered him nothing less than a god who had managed to drive out the Persians. And gods are not supposed to engage in such earthly matters, and it was no big deal that Artemis herself had once personally installed the columns.
Alexander the Great did not lose heart and ordered the funds that the Ephesians previously paid to the Persians as tribute to be redirected to the restoration of the temple. And so it happened that the Ephesians themselves began to restore it. And since the king was now a god, they were obliged to place in their sanctuary a portrait of Alexander the Great by the best artist of all times and peoples, Apelles, who painted such a realistic portrait of the commander that people began to bow and greet him upon seeing it, so lifelike was the work. For this work, Apelles received 20 talents of gold (336 kilograms, over a billion rubles).
The temple was restored according to old plans by Deinocrates himself (according to Strabo, his name was Cheirocrates), later known as the architect of Alexandria. Again, the best craftsmen from all over Greece were invited. The architect preserved the previous building plan, raising the structure on a higher stepped foundation. The third temple was larger than the second; 137 meters long, 69 meters wide, and 18 meters high. The roof of the temple was supported by 127 columns arranged in nine rows. According to legend, each of these columns was a gift from one of 127 kings. Inside, the temple was decorated with remarkable statues by Praxiteles and reliefs by Scopas, but even more magnificent were the paintings of this temple. Thus, in gratitude to Alexander the Great, who allocated funds for construction, the Ephesians commissioned his portrait for the temple from the artist Apelles. He depicted the commander with a lightning bolt in his hand, like Zeus. When the patrons came to accept the canvas, they were so impressed by the perfection of the painting and the optical effect (it seemed that the hand with the lightning bolt protruded from the canvas) that they paid the author twenty-five gold talents—probably no artist for the next three centuries managed to receive such a fee for a single painting.
The last version of the temple is described in Antipater of Sidon’s work "Seven Wonders of the World": "I have seen the wall of lofty Babylon, on which goes a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes, and the huge labor of the high pyramids, and the extensive tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis, which rose to the clouds, these other wonders lost their shine, and I said: ‘Behold, except Olympus, the Sun has nowhere looked so splendid.’"
The Temple of Artemis was used not only for religious ceremonies but also served simultaneously as the financial and business center of Ephesus. The temple was completely independent of the city authorities and was managed by a college of priests.
The third temple existed for six centuries, and its description is repeatedly found in early Christian chronicles about Ephesus. According to the New Testament, the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in Ephesus caused the local inhabitants to fear the desecration of the temple. The 2nd-century work of John the Theologian includes an apocryphal story about the destruction of the Temple of Artemis, according to which the apostle John publicly prayed in the temple, casting out its demons, and "suddenly the altar of Artemis split into many parts... and half the temple fell, instantly turning to the Ephesians, who wept, prayed, or fled."
Later, as Christianity flourished, the temple was closed altogether and gradually dismantled for the construction needs of basilicas, including the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. A series of earthquakes, the invasion of the Ottoman Turks, and the rise of groundwater led to the disappearance of the ancient temple until its remains were excavated in 1869 by John Wood, among whose finds were the tomb of the legendary founder of Ephesus, Androclus, a hoard of coins, but most importantly, an inscription at the base of a column indicating the name of Croesus—the main sponsor of the grand construction.
Currently, the excavated ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus are located on the outskirts of the Turkish city of Selçuk and are accessible to all visitors; the area is not guarded. Of the 127 columns, only one is visible, and even that is assembled from different pieces. Nevertheless, even in this state, the excavation site with the remains of the foundation and steps makes a strong impression.
According to ancient Greek mythology, Artemis was the daughter of the goddess Leto (goddess of night, the night sky) and the amorous Zeus. Zeus’s lawful wife Hera, known for her "good-naturedness," decided to punish Leto for her husband's infidelity and for supporting the people of Troy in the Trojan War by strictly forbidding the earthly land to accept the birthing mother and forbidding the goddess of childbirth Ilithyia to be present at the birth. According to one version, Poseidon, at Zeus’s request, provided Leto with a place to give birth in the form of a floating island, which did not fall under the category of "earthly land," and after the birth, the island changed from mobile to stationary, known in history as Delos. The second version, based on the dating of events, seems more plausible. According to it, Leto gave birth to twins Artemis and Apollo in an olive grove near Ephesus thanks to Ilithyia, who violated Hera’s ban at the request of other gods.
Originally, Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. Over time, new spheres of responsibility were added, and Artemis became the protector of domestic animals. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the goddess’s activities had greatly expanded: protector of forests, fields, groves, morning dew, agriculture, fertility, and even medicine. Artemis was considered the ideal of female beauty among the Greeks. While in the Peloponnese she was depicted with a bow and arrows, in Ephesus she was portrayed as many-breasted with a crescent moon and star (only after seeing the statue of Artemis in Ephesus in person did I realize what those barrel-like objects hanging all over her body were...).
The cult of Artemis of Ephesus existed in Ephesus long before the city was founded by the Greeks and was established by the Carian tribes who had lived there since ancient times. Scholars propose the theory that at the dawn of Christianity, the cult of Artemis in Ephesus was gradually reorganized into the cult of the Virgin Mary. It is no coincidence that near the dismantled temple of Artemis, a temple of the Virgin Mary was built, and the very house where Mary spent her last days is located nine kilometers from Ephesus (the Bible does not clearly state where the Virgin Mary died, but there is a version that soon after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, she went to Ephesus, where she settled in a small house and passed away in 48 AD. The house has now been restored and is open to visitors).
The temple underwent several life cycles. The earliest version of the temple dates back to the Bronze Age. The Alexandrian scholar and poet Callimachus, in his "Hymn to Artemis," attributed its construction to the Amazons. In the 7th century BCE, this temple was destroyed by a flood. Then, around 550 BCE, reconstruction began, or rather the construction of a new, much larger temple, led by the famous architect Chersiphron together with his son Metagenes. The construction of this temple lasted about two centuries and was completed around 380 BCE by architects Demetrius and Paeonius. In 356 BCE, the temple was burned down by Herostratus but was restored after some time. The last version of the temple, funded by Alexander the Great, is described in Antipater of Sidon’s work "Seven Wonders of the World":
On the night of July 21, 356 BCE, according to ancient historians, Artemis left her earthly residence in Ephesus and went to assist Olympias, who was preparing to give birth to the future ruler of the world, Alexander the Great. A common citizen of Ephesus, Herostratus, wishing to become famous, thought of nothing better than simply setting fire to the temple. Finding no one around, Herostratus successfully carried out his plan. Although the building itself was made of marble, the beams were wooden—cypress. First, the contents of the hall and temple storerooms caught fire, then the flames spread to the beams, and the roof collapsed. Artemis soon returned, and Herostratus was captured, tried, and executed. By court decision, the criminal’s name was to be forgotten, but the ancient Greek historian Theopompus, who moved to Ephesus in his old age, preserved this name as a warning for posterity.
In the archaic period, three sanctuaries successively existed on the site of the future famous temple in Ephesus: from the 8th century BCE; mid-7th century BCE; a small temple with two columns in front of the entrance measuring 16×31 meters.
The exact date of the first sanctuary’s construction is difficult to estimate. The ancient Greek writer and geographer Pausanias (2nd century AD) believed that this temple was older than the famous oracle of Apollo at Didyma, built around the 7th century BCE. According to Pausanias, the pre-Ionian inhabitants of Ephesus were the Leleges and Lydians. The Alexandrian scholar and poet Callimachus, in his "Hymn to Artemis," attributed the construction of the temenos in Ephesus to the Amazons, who worshipped Artemis as their patroness. Pausanias quoted poems by Pindar, who claimed that the temple’s founders—the Amazons—were connected with the siege of Athens, but Pausanias himself, unlike Tacitus, believed that the temple appeared before the Amazons.
Modern archaeological excavations have not confirmed the existence of the Amazons mentioned by Callimachus but do not contradict Pausanias’s claims about the antiquity of this place. Excavations carried out here before World War I by British archaeologist David Hogarth allow the identification of remains of three sequentially constructed temple buildings. Excavations confirmed that as early as the Bronze Age, there was a temple with a clay floor built in the second half of the 8th century BCE. The temple in Ephesus was an example of a peripheral temple on the coast of Asia Minor and was possibly the earliest Greek peripteral temple. This temple was destroyed by a flood in the 7th century BCE, which deposited a layer of sand and debris more than half a meter thick over the original clay floor. Among the debris were fragments of bas-reliefs depicting griffins and the Tree of Life, apparently from northern Syria, as well as drilled amber ingots of elliptical cross-section. These were probably decorations of the xoanon of the Ephesian goddess, destroyed in the flood. According to Bammer’s assessment, although the temple site was flooded and between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE was covered with a 2-meter layer of silt deposits, and from the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE with a new 2.4-meter layer, further use of this site "indicates that preserving the identity of the actual location played an important role in sacred organization." Heraclitus of Ephesus (6th–5th centuries BCE) dedicated his work "On Nature" to the temple of Artemis.
The construction of the new temple was financed at least partially by Croesus, king of Lydia, who was ruler of Ephesus. The new temple project was developed around 550 BCE by the famous Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes. According to the project, the temple building was 115 meters long and 46 meters wide and was presumably the first Greek temple built of marble. The peripheral columns were 13 meters high and stood in two rows, forming a wide ceremonial passage around the cella, where the statue of Artemis was located. Thirty-six of these columns, according to Pliny, were decorated with carved bas-reliefs. Sculptor Endoios created a new statue of the goddess from ebony or blackened grapevine wood and naiskos, to place it east of the altar in the open air.
The construction of the second temple lasted about two centuries and was completed around 380 BCE by architects Demetrius and Paeonius.
The temple became an important attraction of Ephesus, visited by merchants, travelers, and rulers of states, many of whom brought offerings to Artemis in the form of jewelry and various goods. According to legends, the temple also served as a refuge for those fleeing persecution or punishment.
Analysis of fragments of bas-reliefs on the lowest drums of the temple columns, kept in the British Museum, showed that columns from the previous version of the building, properly decorated, were used in the construction of the second temple. Apparently, Pliny the Elder was unaware of this, as he claimed in his "Natural History" that the architects of the new temple decided to build it on marshy land as a precaution against earthquakes.
According to legend, in 356 BCE, on the night when the future Alexander the Great was born in Pella, the capital of Ancient Macedonia, a vain citizen of Ephesus named Herostratus set fire to the great temple, wishing to become famous this way. Plutarch wrote that Artemis was too busy with Alexander’s birth to save her temple. Since then, the name Herostratus has become proverbial and entered history, although by decision of the city assembly it was to be forgotten forever. Official documents refer to him simply as "a madman," but historian Theopompus, recounting Herostratus’s crime, thus preserved his name for posterity.
The most interesting thing is that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus became considered a "wonder of the world" not before the fire set by Herostratus, but after large-scale restoration work, as a result of which the temple became even bigger, taller, and more beautiful. Therefore, it is fair to call the temple not the Third but the Fourth Wonder of the Ancient World. This was thanks to the unprecedented generosity of Alexander the Great and the legendary cunning of the people of Ephesus.
In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great, during his victorious campaign against Persia, arrived in Ephesus, where he found the temple in a sad state. Having heard much about the beauty of the sanctuary, Alexander offered to restore the temple of Artemis at his own expense, but was refused by the inhabitants... The Greek population of the city perceived Alexander as a foreigner and barbarian from whom help should not be accepted, despite the fact that the Macedonian ruler had freed Ephesus from Persian oppression. Not to offend the king, they told him that they considered him nothing less than a god who had managed to drive out the Persians. And gods are not supposed to engage in such earthly matters, and it was no big deal that Artemis herself had once personally installed the columns.
Alexander the Great did not lose heart and ordered the funds that the Ephesians previously paid to the Persians as tribute to be redirected to the restoration of the temple. And so it happened that the Ephesians themselves began to restore it. And since the king was now a god, they were obliged to place in their sanctuary a portrait of Alexander the Great by the best artist of all times and peoples, Apelles, who painted such a realistic portrait of the commander that people began to bow and greet him upon seeing it, so lifelike was the work. For this work, Apelles received 20 talents of gold (336 kilograms, over a billion rubles).
The temple was restored according to old plans by Deinocrates himself (according to Strabo, his name was Cheirocrates), later known as the architect of Alexandria. Again, the best craftsmen from all over Greece were invited. The architect preserved the previous building plan, raising the structure on a higher stepped foundation. The third temple was larger than the second; 137 meters long, 69 meters wide, and 18 meters high. The roof of the temple was supported by 127 columns arranged in nine rows. According to legend, each of these columns was a gift from one of 127 kings. Inside, the temple was decorated with remarkable statues by Praxiteles and reliefs by Scopas, but even more magnificent were the paintings of this temple. Thus, in gratitude to Alexander the Great, who allocated funds for construction, the Ephesians commissioned his portrait for the temple from the artist Apelles. He depicted the commander with a lightning bolt in his hand, like Zeus. When the patrons came to accept the canvas, they were so impressed by the perfection of the painting and the optical effect (it seemed that the hand with the lightning bolt protruded from the canvas) that they paid the author twenty-five gold talents—probably no artist for the next three centuries managed to receive such a fee for a single painting.
The last version of the temple is described in Antipater of Sidon’s work "Seven Wonders of the World": "I have seen the wall of lofty Babylon, on which goes a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes, and the huge labor of the high pyramids, and the extensive tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis, which rose to the clouds, these other wonders lost their shine, and I said: ‘Behold, except Olympus, the Sun has nowhere looked so splendid.’"
The Temple of Artemis was used not only for religious ceremonies but also served simultaneously as the financial and business center of Ephesus. The temple was completely independent of the city authorities and was managed by a college of priests.
The third temple existed for six centuries, and its description is repeatedly found in early Christian chronicles about Ephesus. According to the New Testament, the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in Ephesus caused the local inhabitants to fear the desecration of the temple. The 2nd-century work of John the Theologian includes an apocryphal story about the destruction of the Temple of Artemis, according to which the apostle John publicly prayed in the temple, casting out its demons, and "suddenly the altar of Artemis split into many parts... and half the temple fell, instantly turning to the Ephesians, who wept, prayed, or fled."
Later, as Christianity flourished, the temple was closed altogether and gradually dismantled for the construction needs of basilicas, including the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. A series of earthquakes, the invasion of the Ottoman Turks, and the rise of groundwater led to the disappearance of the ancient temple until its remains were excavated in 1869 by John Wood, among whose finds were the tomb of the legendary founder of Ephesus, Androclus, a hoard of coins, but most importantly, an inscription at the base of a column indicating the name of Croesus—the main sponsor of the grand construction.
Currently, the excavated ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus are located on the outskirts of the Turkish city of Selçuk and are accessible to all visitors; the area is not guarded. Of the 127 columns, only one is visible, and even that is assembled from different pieces. Nevertheless, even in this state, the excavation site with the remains of the foundation and steps makes a strong impression.
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