Hidden Crosses at Seljuk Museum

A visit to the Museum of Ephesus in Selçuk is essential for anyone exploring the ancient city itself. During my first visit, I was struck by the overwhelming presence of idols, statues, and pagan imagery that once filled Ephesus. The Seljuk museum vividly reveals the spiritual world of the ancient city and helps visitors understand the religious atmosphere that early Christians encountered there. Today, a seeker of Christian history will again encounter the ancient focus since one must look beyond the ruins and even the museum, where the exhibitions fail to highlight Christianity’s rise over its final 500 years.

The Focus of the Seljuk Museum

The Seljuk Museum centers on and highlights two remaining idols of Artemis. So much so that a tour guide spoke of the former Artemis temple gifting pillars to the Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul, while avoiding mention of Christianity’s takeover of the area and the temple’s destruction. The ruined temple offered quality pillars to show that idolatry was dead, but faith in Christ now dominated any trace of the former.

After its destruction by the Goths in the 3rd century, much of the Artemis Temple remained in ruins until the time of John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople. At the end of the 4th century, he continually preached against paganism, and his disciples enforced the empire’s anti-pagan edicts that forbade idol worship. In 391 AD, Emperor Theodosius issued an edict banning Greco-Roman practices, which led to the destruction of the temple in 401.

The preserved inscriptions of Ephesus provide one of the clearest surviving voices of the ancient city. Carved into marble streets, temples, fountains, tombs, and church walls, these texts reveal the political, commercial, and religious life of Ephesus across many centuries. Unfortunately, a visitor sees a continued dedication to Artemis and Roman emperors, but minimal space for any later Christian inscriptions.

Today, many of these inscriptions remain within the archaeological site itself, while some are preserved in the Ephesus Archaeological Museum, where they continue to offer a direct and tangible connection to the world of ancient Ephesus. However, for most of us, non-Greek readers, there is minimal detail explaining the items discovered. For instance, the pulpit, which depicts Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, is said to date to the 6th century, but the museum did not bother to mention that it was from St. Mary’s Basilica or St. John’s. Here is a video comparing this one with the one found at St. John’s Basilica.

Here is my visit and observations on some of the Christian items in the museum

For further clarity on this museum, the turkisharchaeonews.net ^[1]https://turkisharchaeonews.net/museum/ephesus-museum-sel%C3%A7uk gives an overview of the secular items in the museum. This site provides more detail than the museum displays and places many of the objects in context. However, there is no reference to any Christian history, even in this thorough write-up.

Statues of Augustus and Livia

One tour group says, “Moreover, signs of the cross are visible on the foreheads of these characters, possibly indicating their symbolic baptism in the early Christian period.”^[2]https://turkisharchaeonews.net/museum/ephesus-museum-sel%C3%A7uk I am not sure what this is all about, but Christians are not Mormons, where we baptize the dead.

At least three statues have been marked with a cross on the person’s forehead. A unique feature for Ephesus. Twice, Emperor Augustus and his wife, Empress Livia. When Jesus was born, this royal couple ruled the Roman world. Then Livia’s son, Tiberius, is mentioned in Luke 3:1 when the Lord Jesus started his earthly ministry. For some reason, the early believers marked them, most likely to show God’s sovereign hand over their lives in bringing the gospel plan into the world. We know that God overrules the nations and creates and deposes rulers in his own time frame.

Christians either acknowledged God’s sovereignty or desired to deface the statues to remind others of God’s purposes. Yet I do not think any early believers would have tried to baptize these rulers to include them in the body of believers.

Christian Byzantine Exhibits

Ephesus, the great biblical city where Christianity formed, spread, and influenced much of Asia Minor, but the museum here dedicated to Ephesus offers only a minor section in a darkened room, without details on the worship of the early church. This video shows the exhibition.

Continued Hidden Crosses

In this city, a major archeological find in 2022 revealed a Pompeii-like capsule of ruins, most likely buried by an earthquake or a foreign invasion. In these finds, over 600 cross-designed pilgrim flasks and hundreds of cross-designed lamps.^[3]see https://www.petersommer.com/blog/archaeology-history/ephesus-byzantine-quarter Yet it appears these are not on display, or may never be, since they highlight the city’s Christian history.

Possibly one or two of them appear in the museum, but what is on display does not seem to come from recent discoveries. These terracotta oil lamps used by believers in sacred spaces like chapels and grave sites. In a non-electric world, the cross’s remembrance and safety made it an important reminder to light their way during the dark hours.

Other major finds from Ephesus are in the British Museum and the Ephesos Museum in Vienna,^[4]https://turkisharchaeonews.net/article/treasures-ephesus-ephesos-museum-vienna so what we are seeing in the Seljuk museum are the 20th-century finds that emerged after the early digs by European researchers.