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Photo: Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The magnificent facade is known from all the tourist brochures. It looks timeless yet is a modern reconstruction. Celsus was a Roman general born in Sardis who rose to be consul in 92 AD; he's not Celsus the Grecian scholar of a century later. The library faced east to make best use of the morning light. Built from 117 AD, it held 12,000 scrolls, surpassed only by ancient Alexandria and Pergamon. The interior and contents were destroyed by fire in 262 AD, when the city suffered both earthquake and invasion by Goths. The facade survived until an earthquake in the 10th / 11th century. So it lay in shards and fragments for 1000 years until reconstructed in the 1970s, as far as possible from original material, along with its intricate carvings. Its statues are of Sophia (personifying wisdom), Episteme (knowledge), Ennoia (intelligence) and Arete (excellence), qualities that might rub off on the library's users and even more upon its benefactors. The interior has been left in ruins: it was a single chamber (modest compared to the facade) and is believed to contain the mausoleum of Celsus himself - an unusual burial arrangement suggesting his family put up the money for the library.
The Library of Celsus is an ancient Roman building in Ephesus, Anatolia, located near the modern town of Selçuk, in the İzmir Province of western Turkey. The building was commissioned in the years 110s CE by a consul of the Roman Empire, Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, as a funerary monument for his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, former proconsul of Asia, and completed during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, sometime after Aquila's death.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
A puzzle—it contained the body of a 15-18 year old woman but had no inscription. She died circa 50-20 BC, when only the most high-ranking nobles were buried within city walls. A legend has grown that this was Arsinoë sister of Cleopatra, but that story doesn't stand up. As if in a scene from an Indiana Jones movie, the body disappeared in Germany during World War II, so modern forensics cannot be brought to bear.
Latrine and richly furnished insula
A compulsory photo stop, a splendid marble 48-seater by the Octagon. Only the residents of the Terrace Houses and a handful of other plutocrats had their own sanitary fittings. Everyone else had to use the communal crappers, of which this is the best preserved. It was roofed, and beneath the seats flowed spent water from the bathhouse. Backsides were cleansed with sponges on sticks - after use these were rinsed in the flow then dunked in vinegar to await the next customer. Analysis of the slurry showed that citizens were riddled with intestinal worms, disseminated from other human and animal backsides further up the food and water chain.
Hadrian Tapınağı
It's an attractive compact structure from say 117 AD—that's shortly before Emperor Hadrian busied himself building a wall across northern England, and perhaps the dedication to him came later. It was excavated and re-constructed from its fragments in the 1950s. Medusa is one of the carvings on its portico.
This is the only site within Ephesus with an additional admission fee, and it's worth it. This was the upmarket residential quarter, built on the slope above Curetes Street, and blinged with marbles and mosaics. Excavations began in the 1960s and continue, with the whole area under a protective canopy and with raised walkways and interpretive boards.
Coressus Harbour
Originally at the foot of Arcadiane. Visitors and goods landed and cleared customs here at least until the 2nd century AD. Then the area silted up, and the city fought a 500–year battle, dredging and cutting navigation channels to try to retain sea access. You can't reach the harbour, but from the higher ground look over fields and highways with traffic scurrying away to an unseen Aegean.