The Terrace Houses

Everything else at Ephesus is public: streets, squares, temples, a theatre, a library that is really a tomb. The Terrace Houses are the one place where you go indoors, into rooms that belonged to specific families, and they survive for the dullest and best of reasons — the hillside came down on top of them and sealed them.

What is actually in there

Seven separate apartments, stacked up the slope in a single block, each arranged around an open courtyard with the rooms opening off it. They were lived in from around the first century BC until the seventh century AD, rebuilt and redecorated many times over.

What you walk through now is a steel-and-glass shelter with a system of raised walkways running up through the excavation, so you look down into the rooms and across at the walls. It takes about forty-five minutes at a normal pace, and it climbs — a lot of the route is stairs.

The things worth slowing down for:

• The wall paintings. Whole schemes, not fragments: red and ochre panels, framed figures, a room of the Muses, another with scenes from Euripides and Menander. This is Roman domestic decoration standing where it was painted, which is close to unique.
• The floors. Black-and-white geometric mosaic in the corridors, and in the grander rooms coloured panels — a Triton and a Nereid, a lion, a plaited border that goes on for metres.
• The Marble Hall. In Dwelling Unit 6, a reception room faced floor to ceiling in cut marble, with a vaulted apse. It is the single most impressive interior at Ephesus.
• The plumbing. Clay pipes in the walls, latrines inside the houses, and under some of the floors a hypocaust — heated rooms in a city where it never really gets cold.

Why they are cool

Literally. The shelter is roofed and shaded, and it holds a lot less heat than the open street. On an August afternoon that is not a small thing: it is the only part of Ephesus where you can stop moving.

What it costs, and when it shuts

The Terrace Houses need a separate ticket on top of the site entry, and the Museum Pass does not cover it. More importantly, the Terrace Houses ticket office closes earlier than the site does — see opening hours for today's times. Arriving at the Lower Gate late in the afternoon and walking uphill is the standard way to miss them.

If you are deciding whether to pay, we have made the argument properly.

One warning

Photography is fine, but the walkway is narrow and there are places where a group stops dead. If you are short of time and the entrance is backed up, go in anyway — the queue is at the door, not inside.