Ephesus

The Artemis worshipped at Ephesus was not the Greek huntress with her bow. She was a great goddess of the Anatolian type, absorbed into a Greek name, and her cult image showed her rigid and pillar like, wrapped in animals, with rows of oval objects across her chest that have been read as breasts, as bull testicles from sacrifice, as gourds and as amber ornaments. No reading commands agreement, which is itself informative: the image was old enough that the people who copied it were no longer sure what it meant.

Her temple was among the largest Greek buildings ever raised and was counted a wonder of the world. It burned in 356 BCE, according to the story at the hands of a man who wanted his name remembered, and the Ephesians rebuilt it grander. Like other great sanctuaries it functioned as a bank and a place of asylum, and its estates and treasure made it a power in the city's affairs rather than an ornament to them. A month of the calendar and an annual festival were hers, and images of the goddess in silver and other materials were made for pilgrims to take home.

That trade is what produces the confrontation described in Acts, where a silversmith argues that the new preaching threatens both the goddess and the livelihood of those who work for her, and a crowd fills the theatre for two hours chanting her greatness. Ephesus was also a warden of temples of the imperial cult, so the city held the machinery of two religions of scale at once.

Ephesus claimed the apostle John early. Polycrates, bishop of the city late in the second century, wrote to Rome that John was buried there, and by the sixth century Justinian had raised a great cross shaped basilica over the tomb on Ayasuluk hill. The city also generated the legend of the Seven Sleepers, young Christians who took refuge in a cave during a persecution and woke generations later to find the empire Christian. That story travelled: it is told in Syriac and Greek, and a version of it stands in the eighteenth sura of the Quran, which takes its name, the Cave, from it.

A house on the hill above the ruins is venerated as the last home of Mary. The identification is modern, made in the nineteenth century from the recorded visions of a German nun who had never travelled, and followed up by clergy who found a ruined building on the spot. Several popes have visited. The Catholic Church treats the site as a place of pilgrimage without pronouncing on the claim, which is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied.

The council that met in the city in 431 was called to settle whether Mary might properly be called Theotokos, God bearer. Cyril of Alexandria opened proceedings before the bishops supporting Nestorius had arrived, secured the condemnation of Nestorius, and the rival session that followed condemned Cyril in turn. The emperor eventually confirmed the first. The churches that would not accept the ruling became the Church of the East, so a decision taken in Ephesus set the eastern boundary of the imperial church for good.