Ephesus

Roman builders brought fresh water from the mountains into the city.

People collected the water at fancy fountains. A long street, lined with statues and buildings, went through the middle of town.

Ephesus was a planned city, with streets laid out in a grid. One street did not follow the grid: Curetes Street, an older route that wound down between the hills. Over time it became a grand avenue lined with monuments and fountains, and later only people on foot could use it.

The Romans cared about water. Aqueducts, long channels for water, brought fresh water from the mountains into the city. People collected it at public fountains, some of them grand buildings decorated with carvings and statues. A sea channel kept ships moving to the harbor, though the mud from the river made that harder and harder.

The ÖAI describes Lysimachus's planned city: a 9 km fortification wall on the mountain slopes and a Hippodamian grid, with few Hellenistic monuments still visible beyond the great theater, begun in the 3rd century BCE and fundamentally altered under Rome. Curetes Street, originally a processional route, kept its irregular course and became an inner-city boulevard of honorific monuments and public foundations; once the Heracles Gate was built in late antiquity, carriages could no longer pass.

Roman investment focused on water: aqueducts brought mountain water to public fountains, and nymphaea such as the Nymphaeum Traiani, the end point of a long pipeline, were elaborate monuments to their donors. Britannica dates the triumphal arch to 3 BCE and an aqueduct to 4 to 14 CE, and notes that in Roman times a sea channel to the harbor was maintained only with difficulty.

Archaeologists have been digging at Ephesus for more than 100 years.

They find old buildings and fit the broken pieces back together. Millions of visitors come every year to walk the old streets.

In 1863 John Turtle Wood, an English railway engineer, began searching here for the Temple of Artemis for the British Museum. In 1895 Austrian archaeologists began excavating, and they still work at Ephesus today. In the 1950s they uncovered Curetes Street, and later they put buildings like the library front back together.

Today researchers use modern methods, some of which do not even need digging. Ephesus has become Türkiye's most visited archaeological site, with around 4 million visitors a year (2025), the Austrian team says.

The ÖAI's research history runs from early travelers' accounts, through John Turtle Wood's British Museum excavations (1863 to 1874), which uncovered the theater and other buildings and located the Artemision, to Otto Benndorf's Austrian excavation, begun on 20 May 1895 with imperial approval and private funding; the Austrian Archaeological Institute itself was founded in 1898 in response to its success. In the 1950s, large-scale clearances exposed Curetes Street; re-erections followed, from the Temple of Hadrian (1957) to the library facade (1978).

Since the 1990s the emphasis has shifted to study, publication and targeted, often non-destructive fieldwork. The ÖAI reports about 4 million visitors a year (2025), making Ephesus the most visited archaeological site in Türkiye. UNESCO notes that earlier repairs with unsuitable materials are being corrected with reversible techniques.