Selçuk

The hill of Ayasuluk on which the town stands was inhabited long before the Roman city beside it: Bronze Age settlement here is linked with Apasa, a capital mentioned in Hittite records. Ephesus itself grew up on the plain below around the sanctuary of Artemis, whose temple, rebuilt in the 4th century BC, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Under Rome the city became the capital of the province of Asia, a centre of early Christianity where Paul preached and to which one of the letters of Revelation was addressed.

The harbour was the city's making and its undoing. Silt carried down by the Küçük Menderes gradually closed it, trade fell away, and from late antiquity the population drifted up to the defensible hill. Justinian built a great domed basilica there in the 6th century over what was held to be the grave of John the Evangelist, and walls and a citadel followed as Arab raids struck the coast. The settlement became known as Ayasuluk, from the Greek for the holy theologian.

Turkish principalities took the region in the 13th and 14th centuries, and under the Aydınids the town flourished again as a port on a new outlet to the sea, with the İsa Bey Mosque built in 1375 as the high point of that period. The Ottomans absorbed the beylik in the 15th century, after which the town declined into a malarial village on a marshy plain. Systematic excavation of Ephesus began in the 19th century and continues today; the settlement was renamed Selçuk in 1914, malaria was cleared in the republican period, and from the 1970s tourism turned a farming town into one of the best-known small towns in Turkey.

Selçuk lives between two identities: an Aegean farming town of about the size where everyone knows everyone, and a place visited by millions over the decades because of what lies three kilometres away. The result is a town used to foreigners and largely relaxed about them, with pension owners who have hosted guests for two generations, and a main square where farmers, students and travellers share the same tea gardens.

The most distinctive local tradition is camel wrestling. Through the winter, decorated bull camels are brought to arenas across the Aegean countryside, and the January festival outside Selçuk is the biggest of them; it is as much a family picnic, with grilled sausage and music, as a contest. The region's other folk emblem is the zeybek, the slow, weighted dance of the Aegean hills, performed at weddings and public ceremonies.

Religion here is visible in several forms at once. The Basilica of St John and the House of the Virgin Mary draw Christian pilgrims, and the house is also visited by Muslim Turks, for whom Mary is a revered figure. The İsa Bey Mosque continues in use below the hill. The nearby village of Şirince, whose Greek Orthodox inhabitants left in the early 1920s, keeps that history in its stone houses and its Ottoman-era Christian architecture.

The district of Selçuk has about 38,000 residents, most of them in the town itself and the rest in villages spread across the plain and the hills. It is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, and the bus station, the railway halt, the market place and the mosque are all within a few streets of each other.

Agriculture is still the base of the economy. The alluvial plain of the Küçük Menderes produces peaches, citrus, cotton and vegetables, olive groves cover the slopes, and livestock is kept in the villages; the weekly market is where much of it is sold. Tourism supplies the rest, through pensions, restaurants, guides, carpet and souvenir shops and the coach traffic from the cruise port at Kuşadası, and the work is strongly seasonal.

Daily rhythms are those of a hot-country town: early starts, a slow middle of the day in summer, and evenings in the tea gardens and on the square. The arches of the Byzantine aqueduct running through the centre are a fixture of the street scene. Concerns include the seasonality of work, water for irrigation in dry years, the balance between farmland and building, and the wish for visitors to stay a night rather than pass through on a coach.

The cooking is Aegean and rural. Vegetables and wild greens stewed in olive oil, courgette flowers, artichokes and broad beans in spring, and salads of tomato, cucumber and herbs accompany almost every meal. Cheeses from the surrounding villages, home-cured olives, and bread from wood-fired ovens are the everyday staples, and breakfast is a long table of small dishes with tea.

A grill-house staple is çöp şiş: lamb marinated with garlic, tomato and herbs and grilled on thin wooden skewers rather than iron ones, served with grilled peppers, onion and bread; it is eaten across Anatolia and is common in the villages around the town. Kebab houses in the centre also do the standard Turkish grills, and gözleme — thin dough folded around cheese, potato or greens and cooked on a griddle — is sold at the market and by village women at the sites.

Fruit defines the sweet side. The plain grows peaches, figs and citrus, and dried figs from the Menderes valleys are a regional export. Şirince, in the hills above the town, is known for homemade fruit wines pressed from berries, apples and pomegranates, sold from stalls along its lanes, and for its olive oil. Turkish coffee and endless glasses of black tea punctuate the day, as everywhere in the region.