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The Temple of Artemis
The great marble temple of Ephesus, now a single column in a marshy field
Antipater of Sidon, the poet who listed the seven wonders, wrote that the others paled beside the house of Artemis at Ephesus. It was among the largest temples the Greek world ever built, a forest of marble columns raised to the goddess whom Ephesians honored as their city's protector and who drew pilgrims, gifts and money from across the Mediterranean. The temple doubled as a treasury and a place of sanctuary. Its fame was so great that a man named Herostratus burned it in 356 BCE, by ancient accounts to make his name immortal, and the Ephesians answered by building it again, grander still. Today a single reassembled column marks the spot.
The temple stood on low, marshy ground just outside the town of Selçuk in western Turkey, about 3 kilometers from the ruins of Ephesus, whose harbor long ago silted up and left the sea some 8 kilometers away. The rebuilt temple measured roughly 137 by 69 meters, according to Pliny the Elder, who counted 127 columns about 18 meters tall, 36 of them carved with figures. Almost none of it survives in place. Visitors now see one column, pieced together from fragments, rising from a pool of groundwater that often floods the foundations, with the Byzantine Basilica of St. John and the Isa Bey Mosque on the hill behind. Sculpted column drums and other pieces from the site are in the British Museum in London.
The site was sacred long before the Greeks, and the first great marble temple, paid for in part by King Croesus of Lydia, was begun around 550 BCE. After the fire of 356 BCE the rebuilding took decades, and tradition says Alexander the Great offered to fund it and was politely refused. Under Rome the sanctuary flourished, and the Book of Acts records a riot of Ephesian silversmiths who feared the apostle Paul's preaching would hurt their trade in images of the goddess. Gothic raiders damaged the temple in 262 CE, and as Christianity spread it was abandoned and quarried, its stone reused elsewhere by about 401 CE. The English engineer John Turtle Wood found its remains in 1869. The site lies within the Ephesus World Heritage property, inscribed in 2015.