Monday 18th March 2013 +2.0hrs GMT: Kusadasi, Turkey ­ The Gateway to The Ancient City of Ephesus & The House of the Virgin Mary

Kusadasi proved to be a clean and pleasant resort town on Turkey’s Aegean coast.  The town has a resident population of 50,000 that swells to over half-a-million in the summertime when the resorts fill with tourists from Turkey and all over the world.

Kusadasi is the gateway to the ancient centre of art and culture – Ephesus – that has been settled and conquered by many civilisations from its foundation in 3,000 BC.

Ephesus is one of Turkey’s best-preserved ancient cities but it is going to be extremely difficult to portray the former glories of this city without access to images that show what the buildings looked like in their original state.  I have some books that I bought that do this but of course these illustrations cannot be reproduced for the Internet so I suggest that if you want to gain a better impression that you visit Wikipedia.  My intention is to bring you some photos of the more recognisable structures and provide a short history of the city.

Our first stop this morning was to the House of the Virgin Mary, believed to have been her last residence.  A bedridden nun, Katarina Emmerich, brought the house to public attention in the 19th Century when she had a vision of the Apostle John and Mary travelling to Ephesus after Christ’s Resurrection. Years after her death a French clergyman visited the area and found a house matching the description that had been recorded by the nun but his discovery was dismissed by the bishops of Paris and Rome.  In 1891 a research team visited the area and discovered a small chapel in some ruins together with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Excavations revealed that part of the foundations dated back to he 1^st Century AD. The house was restored in 1950 and is now a popular place of pilgrimage and will be the first foreign place to be visited by the newly elected Pope.

The house is located on hills overlooking Ephesus about 7 kilometres to the south.  This location had been accurately described by the nun and was one of the clues that led the research team to the discovery of the house.