Ephesus, the House of the Virgin Mary and Şirince

Ephesus is the rare ancient city where you can still tell what it was like to live in one. The streets are paved, the plumbing is visible, the shopfronts line up along the marble, and the buildings stand tall enough that the scale does the explaining for you.

The route through the site runs downhill along Curetes Street, past the Temple of Hadrian with its arch and carved figures, the terraced housing of the wealthy quarter, and the public latrines that every guide stops at for good reason. It ends at the Library of Celsus, whose two-storey façade of columns and niches is the image most people carry of Turkey before they ever arrive. Further on, the Great Theatre cuts into the hillside with seating for around twenty-five thousand — a working venue in the Roman city and the setting for the riot of the silversmiths described in the Book of Acts.

Ephesus was a port, and its wealth came from shipping. The river silting the harbour is what eventually killed the city, which is why the Arcadian Way now runs out into flat farmland instead of a dock. Knowing that turns an odd empty space into the reason the whole place was abandoned.

On the wooded slope of Bülbül Dağı above the ruins stands a small stone chapel, identified in the nineteenth century as the house where Mary is said to have spent her last years. It is compact, dim and calm, with a spring and a wall where visitors leave written petitions. Whatever you make of the tradition, the atmosphere is unlike anything else on the route — people come to pray here, not to photograph.

The day finishes uphill in Şirince, a village of stone and plaster houses that was Greek Orthodox until the population exchange of the 1920s. It is known for fruit wines — apple, peach, pomegranate, mulberry — sold from cellars along the lanes, and for local pottery and hand-woven cloth in the market stalls.

The price takes in door-to-door driving in air-conditioned Mercedes transport, guiding, a ticket for each site on the route, a sit-down lunch, bottled water and insurance.