The story
Seven young Christians of Ephesus refused to sacrifice to the emperor — Decius, in the persecution of the 250s — and hid in a cave on the mountain. The cave was sealed. They slept.
They woke, went into town to buy bread, and paid with a coin two centuries out of date. The city they walked into was Christian. They told their story, and died.
The tale spread across the Mediterranean and beyond it. It is in Gregory of Tours, in the Syriac writers, and in the eighteenth sura of the Qur'an — Al-Kahf, the Cave — where the sleepers have a dog with them. That shared inheritance is the reason the site has Muslim visitors as well as Christian ones.
What is actually there
Not a cave, in the sense the name suggests. A necropolis: several hundred tombs cut into the rock and built in vaulted chambers, stacked up a steep hillside in terraces, with the remains of a church among them.
It was a Christian burial ground in use from perhaps the fifth century, and it grew because people wanted to be buried near the sleepers — which is the usual mechanism by which a holy site becomes a large one.
Much of it is fenced. You walk a path along and above the tombs and look down into the chambers.
Whether to go
It takes twenty minutes and it is free, and it is quiet in a way nothing at Ephesus is. If you like the places where a story attached itself to a landscape, go. If you want architecture, do not — this is excavated rock and brick, and it has been picked over.
The best time is late afternoon, when the sun comes round onto the slope.
Getting there
About a kilometre east of the Ephesus Lower Gate, on the road that runs round the north side of Mount Pion towards Selçuk. There is a small car park and a signposted path.
Walking from the Lower Gate takes fifteen minutes along the road, which is not pleasant in the heat. A taxi from Selçuk is a few minutes. Most organised tours skip it entirely.
Is the Cave of the Seven Sleepers worth visiting?
Twenty minutes, free, and quiet in a way nothing at Ephesus is. It is a hillside of rock-cut tombs rather than a cave, so go for the story and the atmosphere, not the architecture.
Where is the Cave of the Seven Sleepers?
About a kilometre east of the Ephesus Lower Gate, on the road round the north side of Mount Pion towards Selçuk. There is a car park and a signposted path.
