Prytaneion (Ephesus)

The Prytaneion was the civic and religious heart of ancient Ephesus, situated near the Upper Agora in the city's northwest quarter. It served as the seat of the prytanes — the city's highest magistrates — and housed the eternal flame of Hestia, goddess of the hearth, which was never permitted to go out as it symbolized the living continuity of the polis. Early 20th-century excavations at the site yielded two celebrated marble statues of Artemis, now centerpieces of the Ephesus Museum in nearby Selçuk. What survives today is a field of foundations and a handful of re-erected column drums, but the footprint is legible enough to convey the scale of a building that once organized public life in one of antiquity's largest and wealthiest cities.