Half Day Ephesus Tour
Tour Information
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Half Day Ephesus Tour Itinerary : Ephesus Ruins, Artemission Port : Kusadasi Duration : 3 Hours Service Level : Private Tour Season : 01.01.2010 - 01.06.2010 |
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Prices
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| Tour Plan Meet your guide at the pier of Kusadasi, you will have half hour drive to Ephesus Ruins for your first stop of the tour. Upon reaching the once powerful city, passing by the Magnesia gate, you will enter the administrative section of ancient Ephesus. The guided walking tour will take you through one of the most magnificent excavations in the world. See the Odeon, the Fountain of Trajan; enter a section of the steam baths of Scholastika, the temple of Hadrian and the impressive library of Celsius. The library is adorned with columns and statues. The Grand Theater, where the Apostle Paul preached, is the largest theater in antiquity with a capacity of 24,000 people. You will visit to Artemision. The Temple of Artemis is known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Antic world. It has been built in the areas of Ephesus on a flat area which has over the centuries turned into a swamp. Today one can only see the ruins of the foundations of this marvelous construction of the Hellenistic Age, entirely made of marble and full of sculptured columns' capitals and shafts. The most beautiful remaining of this temple are today exhibited in the London British Museum. You will go back to pier of Kusadasi. |
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| Including * Professional, English speaking, state licensed guides for the guided tours included * Arrival and departure transfers in pier of Kusadasi * Tour transportation with A/C van * All entrance fees as per the itinerary * All service fees and local taxes |
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| Distances from Kusadasi Port Ephesus Ruins: 9.85 Miles Temple of Artemis: 10.9 Miles |
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Information Temple of Artemis
The sacred site at Ephesus was far older than the Artemision. Pausanias understood the shrine of Artemis there to be very ancient. He states with certainty that it antedated the Ionic immigration by many years, being older even than the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma. He said that the pre-Ionic inhabitants of the city were Leleges and Lydians. Callimachus, in his Hymn to Artemis, attributed the origin of the temenos at Ephesus to the Amazons, whose worship he imagines already centered upon an image (bretas).
Pre-World War I excavations by David George Hogarth, who identified three successive temples overlying one another on the site, and corrective re-excavations in 1987-88 have confirmed Pausanias' report.
Test holes have confirmed that the site was occupied as early as the Bronze Age, with a sequence of pottery finds that extend forward to Middle Geometric times, when the clay-floored peripteral temple was constructed, in the second half of the eighth century BC. The peripteral temple at Ephesus was the earliest example of a peripteral type on the coast of Asia Minor, and perhaps the earliest Greek temple surrounded by colonnades anywhere.
The Temple of Artemis, as imagined in this hand-coloured engraving by Martin Heemskerck (1498 - 1574), has the "old-fashioned" look of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and other Italian quattrocento churches of the previous generation.
In the seventh century, a flood destroyed the temple, depositing over half a meter of sand and scattering flotsam over the former floor of hard-packed clay. In the flood debris were the remains of a carved ivory plaque of a griffin and the Tree of Life, apparently North Syrian. More importantly, flood deposits buried in place a hoard against the north wall that included drilled amber tear-shaped drops with elliptical cross-sections, which had once dressed the wooden effigy of the Lady of Ephesus; the xoanon itself must have been destroyed in the flood. Bammer notes that though the flood-prone site was raised by silt deposits about two metres between the eighth and sixth centuries, and a further 2.4 m between the sixth and the fourth, the site was retained: "this indicates that maintaining the identity of the actual location played an important role in the sacred organization" (Bammer 1990:144).
The new temple, now built of marble, with its peripteral columns doubled to make a wide ceremonial passage round the cella, was designed and constructed around 550 BC by the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes. A new ebony or grapewood cult statue was sculpted by Endoios, and a naiskos to house it was erected east of the open-air altar.
This enriched reconstruction was built at the expense of Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia. The rich foundation deposit of more than a thousand items has been recovered: it includes what may be the earliest coins of the silver-gold alloy electrum. Fragments of the bas-reliefs on the lowest drums of Croesus' temple, preserved in the British Museum, show that the enriched columns of the later temple, of which a few survive (illustration, below right) were versions of the earlier feature. Marshy ground was selected for the building site as a precaution against future earthquakes, according to Pliny the Elder. The temple became a tourist attraction, visited by merchants, kings, and sightseers, many of whom paid homage to Artemis in the form of jewelry and various goods. Its splendor also attracted many worshipers.
Croesus' temple was a widely respected place of refuge, a tradition that was linked in myth with the Amazons who took refuge there, both from Heracles and from Dionysus.