Ayasuluk (Selçuk)

Ayasuluk, also written Ayasulug or Ayatholug, takes its name from the Greek Agios Theologos, the apostle and evangelist John, who is said to have lived and died there. Western medieval sources call the town Altoluogo; since 1914 it has been known as Selçuk. It is a small town on the western coast of Anatolia, on the site of ancient Ephesus (which Arabic geographers still called Afsus or Ufsus), in the plain around the mouth of the Küçük Menderes, the ancient Kaystros, at the foot of the Bülbül Dağı, the ancient Koressos. It lies on the railway between İzmir and Aydın and is the capital of the nahiye of Akıncılar in the kaza of Kuşadası, in the vilayet of İzmir. It had 2,793 inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Cuinet, and 4,025 in 1935. ²

The harbour, which had been the source of the town's prosperity, silted up with deposits from the Kaystros as early as the Middle Ages, and the old town declined with it. Ancient Ephesus had been an important commercial centre on the banks of the Kaystros, where gardens and vineyards flourished. Instead of Ephesus, the harbour of Kuşadası, some fifteen kilometres to the south-east and called Scala Nova in western medieval sources, began to flourish; it had 5,442 inhabitants in 1945. The Arab advance to Ephesus was only temporary, in 182/798. The Turkish occupation that followed the victory of Malazgirt (Manzikert, 1071), under the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, came to an end with the victory of the crusaders of the First Crusade near Dorylaeum in 1097. ¹

When the Rum Seljuk empire declined, Turkish troops again penetrated western Anatolia as far as the Aegean coast. Under their leaders they founded principalities, and Ephesus, or Aya Solük, came under the principality of Aydın. Ibn Battuta met the Aydınoğlu Khizir Beg there as the local prince. The Italian republics kept in contact with the principality, and there were Venetian and Genoese consulates in Aya Solük. In 1391, when Bayezid absorbed the principality of Aydın, Aya Solük came under Ottoman rule for the first time; after his defeat it was returned to the princes of Aydın by Timur in 1402. ³

Under Murad II, Aya Solük finally became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1425. From then on it was a kadılık, a district, of the sanjak of Aydın, in the eyalet of Anatolia and later the vilayet of Aydın. Part of the territory, however, was under the Kaptan Pasha, as part of the sanjak of Shughla (İzmir). Aya Solük gradually fell into decay and became little more than a village. The decline was due in part to the changes at the mouth of the Kaystros, where the plain is now a fever-infested swamp, and in part to the growth of neighbouring Kuşadası. ³

Noteworthy monuments include the ruins of ancient Ephesus, the remains of the basilica of St John, and the imposing mosque of Aydınoğlu Isa Bey I, built towards the end of the fourteenth century on the same plan as the Umayyad Mosque. At the foot of the fortress hill, on the Panayır Dağı (the ancient Pion), one can see the cave in which the Seven Sleepers are said to have slept. On the Bülbül Dağı stands a small early Christian building in which the Virgin Mary is said to have lived and died (Panaya Kapulu). In recent times this has become a place of pilgrimage, and the Turkish government has built a road to it. ³

The entry's bibliography cites Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname and L. Massignon's studies of the excavations at Ephesus and of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. ³